How to Stop Your Dog from Nipping and Play Biting – Part 1
Posted by Jeanne on March 9, 2010
Nipping – the playful biting and mouthing of your hands and clothes by your dog – is particularly common among puppies, but can also occur in older dogs that haven’t been taught proper bite inhibition.
It’s natural for dogs to mouth and nip. They explore the world using their mouths – to a dog, his mouth is as important as eyes and hands are to us. Nipping is very different from true aggression: it’s a form of communication, interaction, exploration, and play. From birth, pups use their mouths to explore the den, their mother, and their littermates. From a few weeks old, they use their mouths to play with their siblings: puppies play by biting and mouthing each other. Some adult dogs – usually, those with owners who encourage rough play, or who were removed from the litter at too early an age – retain these same tendencies to nip during play and in moments of emotional duress.
Sibling play is actually how young pups learn a very important lesson, called bite inhibition. If a puppy bites another puppy too hard, the other pup yelps loudly in pain and stops playing with him. This teaches the biter that such a degree of bite force results in an undesirable outcome: social isolation. When other puppies bite him, that’s how he learns what that pain feels like. (This is one of the reasons that puppies removed from the litter too early are often ‘maladjusted’ – they’ve missed out on some of the important lessons their mother and littermates have to teach).
Even pups that have learned basic bite inhibition from their siblings usually need to be reconditioned again upon entering their new home: humans are much more easily damaged than dogs, so it’s necessary for us to intervene and refine the puppy’s bite pressure even further. A dog without any concept of bite inhibition is both annoying and dangerous to have around: a harmless play session can rapidly turn into painful ordeal. Puppies aren’t capable of inflicting serious damage – although their little teeth are razor sharp, their jaws are too weak to do much more than elicit a trickle of blood – but an adult dog can do a great deal more than just scratch the surface, and it makes very little difference to a wounded human that the dog “didn’t mean to do it”!
More on this subject next week…
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Nipping – the playful biting and mouthing of your hands and clothes by your dog – is particularly common among puppies, but can also occur in older dogs that haven’t been taught proper bite inhibition.
It’s natural for dogs to mouth and nip. They explore the world using their mouths – to a dog, his mouth is as important as eyes and hands are to us. Nipping is very different from true aggression: it’s a form of communication, interaction, exploration, and play. From birth, pups use their mouths to explore the den, their mother, and their littermates. From a few weeks old, they use their mouths to play with their siblings: puppies play by biting and mouthing each other. Some adult dogs – usually, those with owners who encourage rough play, or who were removed from the litter at too early an age – retain these same tendencies to nip during play and in moments of emotional duress.
Sibling play is actually how young pups learn a very important lesson, called bite inhibition. If a puppy bites another puppy too hard, the other pup yelps loudly in pain and stops playing with him. This teaches the biter that such a degree of bite force results in an undesirable outcome: social isolation. When other puppies bite him, that’s how he learns what that pain feels like. (This is one of the reasons that puppies removed from the litter too early are often ‘maladjusted’ – they’ve missed out on some of the important lessons their mother and littermates have to teach).
Even pups that have learned basic bite inhibition from their siblings usually need to be reconditioned again upon entering their new home: humans are much more easily damaged than dogs, so it’s necessary for us to intervene and refine the puppy’s bite pressure even further. A dog without any concept of bite inhibition is both annoying and dangerous to have around: a harmless play session can rapidly turn into painful ordeal. Puppies aren’t capable of inflicting serious damage – although their little teeth are razor sharp, their jaws are too weak to do much more than elicit a trickle of blood – but an adult dog can do a great deal more than just scratch the surface, and it makes very little difference to a wounded human that the dog “didn’t mean to do it”!
More on this subject next week…
– if you get stressed or frustrated with his lack of progress, he’ll be able to tell, and his anxiety levels will increase, not decrease.
