Hey everybody today I'm going to be talking about how to teach your puppy
not to mouth or bite at your clothing accessories or your hair. What I've
already worked on with this pup, I've only had him a few days, is working on
the calm settle for food which he's doing right now so I can talk to you. Now
naturally when I train dogs I never want to let them rehearse the undesirable
behavior so in my videos you'll never see the dogs doing the things that
they're not supposed to do. I only show you the small approximations of how to
train the dog what you do want them to do but in this case because I get a lot
of requests of people saying hey how come you're never using untrained dogs
it's because when you train with positive reinforcement it always looks
like the dog is already trained because you're breaking the steps up small
enough that the dog can succeed every step of the way. So this puppy has never
had any training with mouthing and biting and I will show you that my puppy
does mouth and bite at clothing when it moves around but it's not very good
training to do this. On this rare occasion I will show the dog rehearsing
the undesirable behavior. This is because the behavior of tugging is one I do want
for when playing with tug toys in the future. Also showing this specific
undesirable behavior is not stressful for this dog. Seeing what the dog does in
a situation before training actually makes the dog more likely to do those
behaviors in the future. Instead a smarter training plan is training in
small easily achievable steps where the dog doesn't even have a thought to do
the undesirable behavior again. As you can see this is a normal puppy. Puppies
naturally want to grab at anything that moves fast or is dangling like a dress
or your hair or some jewelry or this dish cloth or a sweater sleeve as you're
putting it on. So this is a normal puppy but you'll see during the training the
puppy is not going to be doing this type of behavior.
The point of this exercise is to teach the puppy that when things are dangling
around it means to ignore them and you can still play tug with your dog but
it's really important to put that on a verbal cue like "get it" and always say
"get it" before you offer your dog a toy to tug on so they don't get the wrong
idea that anything that's dangling in their face is fair game to be tugged on.
In this exercise you can either use a clicker or a verbal marker. So you can
either click and then feed a treat or I have a nice calm marker, "good", that means
I'm going to slowly deliver the treats to the puppy like that. The game is
pretty simple. You start off with distractions that are very easy for the
puppy to ignore. So with this sweater, for example, if the puppy's over here
settling or you can have your puppy on a leash and you could have a helper. The
helper is just going to show the sweater and move it slowly and as you move it
you mark and then feed a treat so the puppy is associating that when the
sweater moves and they stay still they get a click and a treat and basically
you're training the puppy to do nothing when they see this happen. "good job!" When
your puppy is having success you can start to make things more exciting. So
I'm gonna move the sweater past the puppy like this, "good, good job" I'm gonna
dangle my sleeve "good job, good boy" Once your puppy has mastered settling with
the distractions you can now practice when you and your puppy are standing up
and moving which is harder for most puppies so you'll need to go back to
marking the moment the distraction happens at first to set your puppy up
for success. "good, good, good"
When your puppy looks calm and can easily ignore the
distraction you can increase how long you make the distraction happen before
you mark. You can also increase the difficulty of the distraction. Most
puppies find fast erratic movement harder to resist than slow predictable
movement. If you have a puppy that's extremely excited about grabbing moving
things you can feed the treat AS you move the thing at first. So I'm moving
this thing and feeding the puppy like that. "good job" And now I'm going to move
the leash first and then mark and feed. If your puppy were
to grab on to whatever it is that you're working with put a high-value treat to
your dog's nose and then start over by making it much less arousing. Also I
have a video on how to train the cue drop so that you can teach your puppy to
let go of things that they start to pick up or they're tugging on. You can also
use a kissy noise or the recall if you see your puppy going over to someone
else to pull on their shoelaces or to get their clothing. You can make your
kissy noise, attention noise or call your puppy to you so that your puppy isn't
practicing that behavior. When you see your puppy get interested in something
like someone's shuffling feet or shoelaces interrupt your puppy and
redirect him to something you do want him to be doing like playing with his
toys. Then make a mental note to work on that specific distraction in a training
session.
Here's a list of the steps: Step 1 mark as the distraction happens Step 2
mark after the distraction begins Step 3 add more time before you mark Step 4 add
difficulty and variety to the training. For the most successful training you
want to work on the distractions before the puppy is exposed to them in real
life. For example, having your kids move in front of your puppy for the first
time in a training session and reinforcing your puppy for remaining
calm as it happens. Beginning first by having the kids simply walking past your
puppy. And now I want to mention that this video is dedicated to one of my
youtube sponsors *Ted Jack*. Because of him and my other sponsors I'm able to create
this material for everyone to learn how to train dogs without the use of
physical or psychological intimidation! So thank you so much to all my sponsors!
See you later guys!