Certainly not immediately, but not too long after JayDee
joined us, we couldn’t help but notice that she did not understand the “not”
part of “not biting the hand that feeds you”. I’d come to appreciate that this was
typical puppy behavior and everyone who had ever had a puppy, who had met
JayDee had a ready and vocal opinion about how to deal with this. I was of the
opinion that this behavior would naturally fade as JayDee matured, but I also
realized that there was a significant risk if mouthing, nipping, and biting was
not dealt with at this early stage of puppy development.
During her second week with us I tried (1) my thumb on her
tongue; (2) my finger down her throat; (3) my curling her lip around the sharp
tip of a pointy tooth; (4) my cuffing her under the chin; (5) the palm of my
hand “stop sign style” popping her on her nose; (6) my exclaiming “no bite”; and
finally, this suggestion of a well-intentioned dog owner: (7) spraying Sweet
Breath Spray into her mouth. Each of these had some temporary effect, but
mouthing and taking fingers and hands into the mouth is typical puppy behavior and
JayDee was being excessively typical.
Ian Dunbar in his book Before and After Getting Your
Puppy, was very specific about developing and refining bite inhibition and
accomplishing a “no dog teeth on human flesh” by four and a half months of age. As we
were inviting families over, for the purpose of helping us socialize JayDee, I
was aware that some of these families had younger children. Therefore, one of
my concerns was that JayDee’s natural playful mouthing/biting could be
frightening for these children and this in turn could escalate into a very negative
situation.
At the end of week two, Pam came down for breakfast with several pages of printed
material that she had downloaded from various websites. All of papers contained
tips to solve the puppy mouthing and biting problem. Coincidentally, all of
these techniques were non-aversive.
jersey.net/~mountaindog/berner1/bitestop.htm
clickertraining.com/node/168
clickertraining.com/node/725
Unfortunately for JayDee all of the techniques I had tried
were aversive. Fortunately, nothing I tried was harsh or abusive, but Pam’s
selection of the printed materials was obviously more to her liking than what I
was trying. I was grateful that Pam, although she was not in agreement with my
approach, chose to send me a message in a non-aversive way! I certainly
appreciated it!
At the same time I contacted Jenn Craig and she e‑mailed me
a bunch of suggestions that both duplicated and expanded the recommendations that
Pam had found.
What began to work for us was to “Yipe” or “Ouch” and then substituting
a handy chew-toy. Standing and turning our back for a 30 second timeout was also
quite effective, but the final result was not instantaneous, rather we saw a
gradual improvement over time.
We also discovered that when JayDee was worn out, just like
a human infant, she could become obnoxious, so at those times we “popped” her
in the crate and she would fall asleep. The mouthing was also exaggerated when JayDee
became excited. Having two teenagers in the house exacerbated the
puppy-excitement syndrome. Daniel liked to use a growley voice and this would
agitate the pup. He also found it great fun to tease JayDee with a towel; talk
about bite promotion! Esther would enter the room and greet the pup with a high
pitched voice – JayDee responded predictably. One of my concerns was to not
allow JayDee to take a higher priority over and above the kids. On the other
hand, these human behaviors were all counter-productive. Therefore, I waited
until I had an opportunity to address these matters at a time when nothing
else, particularly nothing else negative, was happening, and in a
conversational manner suggested that perhaps the kids could modify their
behavior so that JayDee would modify her behavior.
Read next post.
Start at the very first post.
