Puppies grow up, but the biting sometimes continues. The puppy is 6-12-36 months old, and you’re still suffering from constant bites. Why?
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Once you subconsciously reinforced this behavior, and your puppy is still thinking “Biting my human is so fun!”. What exactly could you have done?
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🔸You might have rewarded your puppy with a toy. It’s often recommended to switch the puppy’s attention to a toy. But it’s one thing to give it to him, and another – to start playing with him. What the puppy understands from this is: “When I bite my human, it results in great fun!”.
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🔸You might have “become a toy”. Some dogs enjoy biting, because their owner starts making funny noises, moving around, or even gets up and starts running away. “My prey’s running away! How fun!”.
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🔸You might have rewarded your puppy with attention. You’re sitting behind your desk the whole day, while your pup is bored. He decides to bite your finger, and a miracle happens – there you are, moving, pushing him away… What fun! Even negative attention is so much better than no attention.
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🔸You might have missed a chance to give feedback to him. Maybe you cried out “Ow!”, but kept on playing. This is exactly how your puppy starts ignoring your “Ow!” as something unimportant: “Well, “Ow”, okay, who knows what she’s “Ow-ing” about… People are strange…”
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To show to the puppy that he bit you too hard, these bites must have serious consequences:
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▫️Get offended! If he hurt you, you have the right to hold a grudge, before he comes back with an apology. Logical.
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Works like this: you pup bites you too hard you say a serious “Ow!” and then cross your arms and legs with a serious face, stopping all the interaction with him wait for an apology.
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▫️If he keeps on biting you, just get up and go to another room for a few minutes. If this was his goal in the first place, to get you moving, then you’ll have to use the method of putting the puppy on a leash and tying it to something (make sure you train your puppy to sit tied up beforehand!).
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Put the pup on a leash and start playing. As soon as he bites you, cry out “Ow!” and leave for a bit. The puppy stays, the fun is gone: “Biting hard is no good!”
