Puppy Play Biting vs. Aggressive Biting

Video Transcript

"I wanted to talk a little bit about the biting situation because all dogs do this play biting. Some dogs do aggressive biting and the aggressive biting is, as an example, if you went to take a toy away from him, and he growled and snapped at you or if you went near his food and he snapped at you or growled at you, because of that, that's what we call aggressive biting. We treat those two, in different ways so I want to start out just by talking how we treat him, or how we reprimand him, when he does the play biting. Play biting, all dogs do it, understand that? And they usually do it when they're young and they have very sharp teeth, so we want train them not to do that and it's kind of an interesting thing, it's actually more like saying "I'm in charge and you're not," rather than a training issue. So what we do with that is, lets say your puppy just bit you, you grab a hold of the mussel and you smack your own hand, about that hard, and then you say, in a deep voice "NO" and you offer your hand right back, like that. If your dogs bites you again, you hang on a little tighter and spank your hand again, harder, and put your hand right back again. I don't like to do it when a dog hasn't bitten me because this is so powerful that it'll just distinguish the behavior but you have to do it really quickly. You grab their mussel, like that, and you spank your hand like this and you offer it right back again, really fast. If you do that then they just kind of go "yikes," Sometimes they might even yipe, when you do it and that means you're really getting the message across and again, it's teaching your dog that I'm not supposed to be biting, especially this person. It's interesting, however, that this no bite training, for the play biting, it would extinguish it for you immediately but he may run right over and bite one of your friends or some children. I don't think that children under the age of seven, should be doing this because they could turn into a game, where they're just not coordinated enough, or actually hit the puppy in the eye. Again, it's better if we have an adult intervene, if you're having your puppy bite the children."