If you have a puppy that bites everything that comes within range, don’t worry; it’s completely normal behavior! The puppy bites to learn about the world around him; in the dog’s mouth they truly have all their senses: taste, smell and different pheromones. Despite this, sometimes puppies get a little carried away with the biting, so we’ll find out how to train a puppy not to bite.
Why puppies bite and bite inhibition
First of all, it is our duty to remind you that puppies bite everything they find: furniture, shrubs in the garden and your favorite shoes included, not out of spite, but simply to become familiar with the objects around him. To understand how to teach a puppy not to bite, it will be necessary to take away our precious objects and put them out of reach of our little friends and at the same time make sure to give them appropriate objects to chew on, preferably ones that smell like us.
If your puppy has remained with his mother for the first 2 months of life, they will already partially learned to contain their biting, which is called bite inhibition. In fact, puppies bite their litter mates (they do that to play with one another) but once they grow in their first set of baby teeth, those little bites can be very painful and so the mother or littermates will correct the puppy and ask them to be gentler. If the puppy was prematurely separated from his mother and littermates, there’s a risk that he has not developed this inhibition and thus in an attempt to play, the puppy bites everything and everyone: objects, including their owners and other animals.
How to train a puppy not to bite
If a puppy bites everything it comes into contact with, including adult dogs, it is possible that it will be precisely the latter to teach the puppy not to bite. In the canine world in fact, adults tolerate “rudeness” or the intrusiveness of the puppies only up to the first three months of life. Later, they stop making exceptions and will correct the puppy. If the puppy bites when it should not, the adults will teach them to stop.
The best way to train a puppy not to bite is to say “Ouch!’ when the puppies bites you and then immediately stop any interaction with him. The biting puppy will learn with time, that biting is not acceptable and will understand that it will have to be a little gentler. However, you will need to get used to playing without putting our hands near the puppy’s mouth, playing calmly, and avoiding sudden movements that will overexcite the puppy.
