[BassetsDad]

Good evening everyone.

We brought home our 10 wk old female (Emma) last Friday. What a week it has been! (good in just about every way).

Emma is an incredibly playful puppy. Loves both my wife and I and the kids. However....

When we are playing, she is a pretty intense biter. She also bites a lot when wanting to play. Especially socks, pant legs, etc... . Is there a suggested way to correct this? To me, a soft bite is acceptable, but I am afraid this girl is quite an over acheiver in the bite department. She plays to win!

Thank you all for making this such a great community.

Mark

 

[dlhowl]

It should be stopped or at least take control of it ASAP. When they get BIGGER, it can be a little hard to handle.
I use a basic command when were done playing or petting. Like, "That's enough". I use the command, then walk away.
Last week Dozer pulled me off the couch when he wouldn't let go of my hand. He stopped when I said the command, I should have said it sooner, before he got too rough.
Digger on the other hand, (pun intended) doesn't bite at all, never did.

 

[Betsy Iole]

Play Biting in Puppies (San Francisco SPCA)
How to Teach Bite Inhibition (Modification of Ian Dunbar's method)
Chewing and Biting (Dr. P's Training Library: Puppies)

 

[Milly and Lily]

My recommendation is that any time teech come into contact with skin is that they go into exile. They are banised to a room, in my house it is the hallway bathroom for 15 minutes, if it is play biting. If it is a very hard bite, enough to cause bleeding or a bruise then exile is an hour. Teach them that it is totally unacceptable to put their teech on the alpa's skin. This is working very well for Lily.

 

[jmm]

i am in the same spot you are with a puppy.
i use "time out" as posted above...to the crate.
you are in the midst of heavy teething which hurts the pup and they will nip and bite and gnaw. try little bits of frozen washcloths for you pup to chew on to relieve some of the teething pain. its not 100% but it helps.
i also use a squirt water bottle set on stream. when the biting starts i say "no bite" and a little squirt in the pups face. it works. i tried all of the text book solutions and i was beside myself and my arms and hands looked like i had a heavy drug problem. i also bought something called "bitter apple spray". you can spray this on to socks, hands,furntiure. it must have a awful taste because my pup stops.
good luck

 

[Mikey T]

At ten weeks you want to teach bite inhibition not, no biting. See Betsy link on Bite Inhibition and a slightly different variation see
Bite Inhibition How to Teach it

Remember each dogs reacts slightly different so not all techniques work for every dog. A quick yelp is effective for many dogs, but there are many to that find yelping as encouragement to continue. In such cases ending the game by imeadiately leaving the area works great for most dogs though some require a more extensive time out. You have to play it by ear and adjust to your particular dog.

from Insights Into Puppy Mouthing

"We can't ever just say if a dog is doing X behavior that a handler should always do Y handling technique. It just never is that black and white.

Its all about probabilities. If a dog does X behavior and the response is Y technique than we can often say there is a high probability of a particular response happening with most dogs. There are some fundamental things that are very high probability that apply to many dogs that do nothing or get a completely opposite response from other dogs.

...It looks complicated when plotting it out but in general people have a much better feel for what the dog's probabilities for certain things are then they do in applying that knowledge to specific situations.

90% of the time if I clearly define something for owners and ask what their dog will likely do, they have a wonderfully detailed knowledge of what their dog will probably do. But most people don't look at the perimeters objectively or with clarity and worse they fall into a pattern of waiting until the dog has done the thing they don't want that they knew was probably going to happen. They then respond to what the dog did even though they could have predicted the Undesired response a week ahead of time. "

and also a slightly different take on negative punshiment AKA time out.

"You Won the Prize!"