Puppy Biting
Playing with your puppy serves many purposes at the same time.
How to play with your puppy?
Puppies bite and they do so because it’s fun for them.
When they bite you and you have a large reaction (even if you’re upset), it will typically excite your puppy and make your puppy. Think you enjoy it, and want more of the same.
Rather than playing defence to your puppies, natural tendencies, take a soft toy that your puppy can grip easily and play tug-of-war with your puppy. Do so multiple times a day to encourage your puppy to vent all of its biting energy into a toy. This isn’t a complete training methodology, but it is a good first step in giving your puppy an outlet for his/her biting.
Take a look at the Bulldogs on this page. All of them were big (BIG!) Puppy biters before training.
My own bulldog, Cow, took to this game very easily, and it made life much easier for our family.
The other dog in these videos named “Bacon” was such a little demon when he came in for training that he managed to wrestle a shoe off my foot on his first day while I was walking around the exercise yard.
It’s easy to see with the right approach that even bacon was very direct able and amenable to this game of tug.
There’s a lot more detail that goes into this and your trainer should be able to help you with puppy biting and provide a smart strategy where we don’t make our life as well as the puppies a constant stream of “no, no, no/stop it/topics/stop it”.
