3 simple steps to stop puppy from doing 1 annoying thing

Raising a puppy can be one of the most fulfilling experiences anyone can have. Welcoming a tiny bundle of adorable fluff into your home and providing them with a loving, secure environment in which to grow and flourish can melt even the sternest pet owner‘s heart.

However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows – anyone who’s ever had a puppy knows the pain of their tiny, needle-like teeth sinking into you. While they’re blissfully unaware of the pain they’re causing, that’s little consolation when your cute little furball suddenly morphs into a piranha. Fortunately, this behaviour can be trained out of them – although it requires some effort.

Dog behaviourist Will Atherton outlined three simple steps to prevent your puppy from biting you in a video on Instagram, where he boasts 406,000 followers.

Kicking off the video, he said: “Puppy biting is at minimum annoying, at most actually really painful, and either way, something that you have to fix with your puppy immediately. The first tip is that you have to understand why our puppies bite.”

Pointing to his hands, he continued: “Puppies don’t have these magical things. They don’t have fingers, they don’t have thumbs. The way that we explore the world with our hands, these guys explore the world with their mouth. It’s incredibly normal to put things in their mouth to work out what it is.

“On top of that, puppies are then going to be teething, which is very uncomfortable and painful. One of the ways that they relieve that is by chewing on things. All of those things stack the deck well against us.”

1: Interrupt

Will’s initial advice is to halt your dog as soon as it begins misbehaving. He stated: “You have to interrupt and challenge them when they do chew on the wrong things. Whatever it is that we don’t want them to put in their mouth, we have to say ‘hey buddy, please don’t do that, that’s not the kind of thing that you should chew on’.”

He explained there are two methods to interrupt your dog, which he referred to as passive and active interruption, reports the Mirror. “The best passive interruption out there is that, when they are chewing, when they are getting too excited, it’s just to hold onto their collar,” he said.

Demonstrating on his own dog, he continued: “You can hold onto it firmly like this, where it’s not uncomfortable for the dog whatsoever, but he could try as hard as he wanted and there would be no way he could get my hand or my jumper into his mouth, and I would simply stand here nice and calm, but nice and stern until he stopped. When he stopped and he relaxed, only then would I let go.

“That teaches him that you don’t like this. You want me to let go, but I’m only going to let go when you relax, so guess what they’re going to do more in the future? Relax more.

“Active interruption might be as simple as a verbal ‘ah-ah’ or a ‘no’. On top of that, it might just be a simple touch interruption, where just a little tap on the side might just be enough to say ‘hey, stop, I don’t want you to do that’. It just makes them go ‘oh’, startles them a minute, which then lets us have the breathing room to move into step two.”

2: Redirect

The second step is to guide the dog towards a more positive behaviour, such as gnawing on a toy instead of their owner’s limbs.

Will stated: “Now we have empathy for why they chew, we just need to make sure that we have plenty of opportunities to chew the right things – chew toys, chew sticks.”

3: Reinforce

The third tip is to commend good behaviour and reinforce when the dog has acted appropriately. “We have to make sure we’re reinforcing when they are chewing on the right things,” Will said.

“After we’ve interrupted and redirected, we then want to reinforce. But if they make the good decision to chew on one of their chew toys themselves, we have to come and go ‘hey buddy, that’s really good’, and it might be as simple as this.” He added: “We just have to let them know that, thing that you’re doing right there mate, that’s perfect.”

Concluding, he said: “So we interrupt the bad decisions so that they come down and down and down, we reinforce the good decisions they go up and up and up. We’re left with a perfect canine companion.”