Question
Who she is
So I will start off with who my dog is. She is a Golden Doodle of 9 weeks old so still very much a puppy. We have had her for about 3 days so I understand that a lot of training will take time but I mostly just want to make sure I am doing things correctly.
Background
As of last night she has just gotten over crying for long periods of time at night and now will wimper for about 5 minutes then fall to sleep which is great! Right now we can't take her for walks until the weekend to get her vaccines because we don't want to risk her interacting with another dog and having health problems. We have started this week going to work to which we crate her. She gets our time in the morning, she is in her crate for 4 hours, a dog walker comes over for half an hour, and then 4 hours more in the crate. I mention all of this as this shows her energy level somewhat. I also hate XY questions so figured I would just give all of the information I know.
Problem we are trying to solve
So naturally she is a puppy and wants to play play play which I know is normal. We will sit down with her and play quite often but she will start to nip and us which I understand is because she is playing but of course it hurts and we want to curb that behavior. From reading I have tried this method:
- Redirection: Putting a toy in her mouth. This is usually effective.
- Ignoring: If she redirection doesn't hurt or she starts to bite something that isn't hers like the rug, couch, etc then we say no then ignore her.
- Time out: If the first two methods don't work then we close her off in our kitchen that has two pocket doors for about 2 minutes.
So probably about 50% of the time this will work but I do get confused on a couple situations that occur..
- When we leave the room and come back, of course all she wants to do is play so she starts nipping at our legs. Now when that happens we try to stop movement and ignore her but of course it hurts! So we usually pull her away. I can understand where this may be interpreted as playing so not really sure what a better method is.
- We do try to be super positive with her when she does stuff right.. If she is playing alone, playing with toys and not household things, we will say "good girl" in a positive tone, pet her, to let her know its a good thing.
I apologize for this getting so long but I wanted to make sure any experts on here had all the information and aren't left to assume anything. She will be very sweet at times and cuddle up in our lap and realize it takes time with a puppy, but I just want to make sure we are handling her correctly.
Answer
I am very appreciative for the support in the other answers but wanted to share specifically what I did that seems to be working so that others in the future may learn.
I realized a couple days ago that our method was unintentionally reinforcing bad behavior.
Here is our mistake:
- Puppy would nip at pants / legs
- We would try to substitute with a toy or ignore.
- Ignoring usually resulted in continued biting to try and get us to come down and play with her.
The reason this was failing is because we gave her a toy and played with her, in her mind, so it enforced that biting legs gets that result. Instead what I tried yesterday was:
- Puppy would nip at pants / legs
- I would slowly walk away so that I was in her vision but then look away with my head up (body language for dogs that says I am not interested). Slow is key. If too fast she thinks its playing.
- She would come over and have a little melt down (barking / whining)
- She would go do something else like play with a toy
- After a little bit of her playing for a bit I would reward her by playing with her.
One of my biggest learning was that in her mind me playing with her is one of the top rewards, much higher than pets or "good girl".
Repeating this has yielded great success. I think she was getting frustrated, as were we, when we were just saying no to everything. The key difference in the ignore was walking away too. This method has eliminated almost all nips at the legs with an occasional one today so we are continuing it and will have to see.
Answered By - Eric F