Tito the Shepherd Mix.

Meet Tito!

Tito is a handsome and sweet fellow, in spite of poor eyesight. Tito still happily goes out for walks, visits his parents' vacation home, and loves being brought to work. His favorite place to be is in the center of attention! But more than anything, he loves his parents and just hanging out around the house.

The difficulty was that Tito was not at all confident when left alone. As soon as they went out, he would lie directly in front of the door, or he would watch the door like a hawk to make sure no one left. More recently Tito began to throw a fit when his parents would leave... Tito would try to bite his parents and their clothes in order to get them to stay with him.

When Tito was a puppy, he never quite learned that biting a human was NEVER EVER ALLOWED. When he would play bite, his well-meaning parents would look him in the eye and yell at him to stop. Now, this wasn’t a very pleasant experience for young Tito but to him it was still attention from the people he loved. He learned that when he bit them, his parents would pay more attention to him. Even though that attention was a bit scary it was still better than no attention at all... so he never stopped biting.

A year and a half or so later, when Tito didn’t want his parents to leave him alone he tried the same tactic which worked when he was a puppy: he would bite at them to get them to stay and to pay attention to him.

Bottom line: puppy play biting is natural! It's a good thing — up to a point. Minor play biting should be allowed until the sixteenth to eighteenth week. Young puppies learn that hard bites hurts, and that they need to have a gentle mouth (what we call "bite inhibition.") However, dogs older than five months need to learn that they can NEVER put their teeth on a human. Even though wrestling and rough-housing may seem fun, all it takes is one scared child to create a situation no dog owner ever wants to face.

To learn more about with puppy play biting and adult dogs biting, check out our Playbiting Summary, Out of the Pack, and Out of the Pack Advanced on Zen Dog Training Online.