Almost all of your course materials are designed for puppyhood. Baby puppies, those under 6 months (on average) are going to exhibit most or all of the typical types of puppy biting. This often conflicts with human expectations that bringing home a puppy is going to be fun and easy, and a great experience for children. And while yes bringing home a puppy IS fun, and with planning IS easy, and with realistic expectations and parental involvement can be a great experience for children, realistic expectations for normal and natural puppy behavior and how to manage them are important. Without realistic expectations worry, stress, and dissatisfaction will result.

As our baby puppies become juveniles things finally start to get easier. Older puppies usually don’t even exhibit reflexive biting and indeed when they are calm they usually enjoy petting and cuddling. Teething is an ongoing issue at this stage. Baby teeth have begun to fall out and be replaced with permanent adult teeth. During this process our dog’s mouth will become very sore, swollen, and will occasionally bleed (and stink) as the teeth erupt and push through the remaining jaw and gum tissue. Chewing may take a back seat, but some dogs will still crave soft type chews. Continue picking and keeping up habits because while chewing will decrease during the painful teething weeks it will return with more strength and power once the mouth is no longer painful. Once all the adult teeth are in place, and the gums have healed your juvenile will crave chewing again, and need firmer chews, as their instinct to “set” their adult teeth in place and build back lost jaw muscles through robust chewing increases. Be sure to guard valuables during this phase because puppy may seem to stop chewing on things only to start chewing with a passion a few weeks later. You should also expect a decrease in defensive and offensive biting during this stage. If you have not resolved any gulping, grabbing, or guarding of items by this age it’s time to get serious with the appropriate professional.

Just when your juvenile puppy is winning you over with their charm your adolescent will appear. Expect good mouth manners during this age if you have kept up with your training and practice! But even with consistent practice of manners skills we can expect to see some impulsivity and independence behaviors appear. Don’t worry, this is normal for the brains of all mammals (human teenagers are legend for their impulsive, independent, and emotional behavior!) and while challenging, these behaviors are very much beyond the control of our dog, because they are directly caused by changes happening in the adolescent brain. So patience and good management are again key. While teenagers may display some impulsive mouth behaviors when they are playing and this is normal, we can improve things by using very large toys for cooperative play games, providing lots of “calm” exercise like chewing, sniffing, and training and avoiding high intensity exercise like fetch games over 2 minutes in length, running with dogs (at the dog park for example), or other activities that stimulate our teenager to be out of control. We should expect the occasional targeting mouth mistake but overall we should not be seeing any puppy type biting by this age.

Expectations By Age