12 week old jack russell biting hard

[mattprince]

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Hi,

We have a 12wk old puppy (Jack Russell Female) and have had her for the last 3wks. She has had all her injections except the kennel one which she is having tomorrow. She is adorable most of the time but has a habit of biting. She is also jumping up at faces and snapping to bite. She only does this for small periods of time and then wears herself out i think. I know puppies are teething and biting to explore but i have 3 young children (10,8,5) and don't want this to get worse. When she does bite , she bites hard and growls and really gets nasty with it. Also my wife went to her earlier to pick her up as she was straying from the back garden and she turned, snapped and bit my wife really hard on her hand. Its almost like she has a split personality. 80% of the time she is so calm and gentle and loving but when she is like this she is absolutely evil looking and ferocious.

Any ideas/help appreciated.

Matt

 

[eingana]

Hi Matt and welcome to DogForum

Everything that you've posted above sounds like a completely normal naughty puppy to me Did your children not go through biting phases when they were 18 months old?

It's not appropriate and you need to train her out of doing this, but it's also not aggression or being ferocious. She's a baby and she hasn't yet learned that this is not what you do when playing. Babies have no ability to limit their behaviour- if they're running they're running as fast as they can, if they're biting they're biting as hard as they can and if they're playing then they're giving that their all too. They also don't come out of the box knowing what is good and what is bad. It is your responsibility to teach them that this is an unwanted behaviour.

There's a very simple way to teach a puppy what is not appropriate and it just involves a very clear removal of all forms of attention as soon as they get too far over the top. I'm not talking about waiting for her to bite, I mean at the very first sign that she's getting too wound up or she gets someone's hand in her mouth. All you need to do is to let out the biggest big girly squeal as you can manage, really high pitched, stand up, fold your arms and turn your back on her.

Don't look at her, don't tell her off, don't interact with her in any way- just squeal, fold your arms out of the way so she can't nip at them, remove your lap and pointedly ignore her. When it comes to dogs, telling them off is attention just as much as being nice to them, and this sort of training teaches them that they get no attention (not even a look) when they do something that's not appropriate.

For the first few days you'll be up and down like there's no tomorrow (and it's essential that the whole family join in on this one- teach the children what to do) but it should lessen very quickly once she learns that when she's calm and nice you all pay her lots of attention but when she's being a brat she gets no love at all. She will try to run around to your front again, to force you to pay attention to her, but this is all part of her learning process and as soon as she works out that you will just turn away from her again she will sit down and go very quiet- at which point you can magically come back to life and be all positive and engaging with her now she's being a polite dog.

A couple of years ago one of the rescues that I home check for adopted a dog out to a couple (won't mention where, just in case) and before we did the adoption we made sure that the couple knew that this dog had previously had no basic training so they needed to start from scratch with her, despite her being nearly 6 months old. A couple of weeks after the adoption I got an email which had been sent through about 20 people and got to me finally, asking me to call someone about a dog with this same name. I called the number and found that it was a neighbour of the people who had adopted the dog and she was so concerned about what was happening that she spent the time tracking the rescue down.

It turned out that this couple thought that to train a dog to sit, all you did was to yell 'SIT' at the dog until it sat down. That's all very well, but if the dog has no concept of what you're asking them when you use the word 'sit' then they're not being naughty by not doing it, are they? The couple needed to take more steps backwards before they could move forwards because they just assumed that dogs arrived already knowing what the words 'sit', 'down' and 'leave' meant, but was being naughty and not doing it on command.

Puppies don't know what any of the words you may use with them actually mean, nor what you may want them to do as a result of the command- you have to start with catching them doing it right and then teaching them the word for that. If you stand with a treat in your hand and make eye contact with your dog but don't say or do anything else, they will eventually start doing things randomly to see if they get them the treat (assuming that they know that the treat smells good and they want it, of course). Teaching a 'sit' command to a clever puppy can be done in about 3 minutes, all of which are taken up by doing literally nothing and waiting for their bum to hit the ground then giving them the treat within a couple of seconds so they know that this was what you wanted.

In this case, we're doing the opposite. By letting your pup know that she only gets attention when she's not being a devil dog, this will maximise the time that she is not a devil dog, because she likes attention and fuss

I doubt that this will be your last issue with training your little one, but good luck with getting her onto the learning ladder

 

[chalkie222]

Great reply :- )

 

[mattprince]

Thanks a lot for the lengthy reply. Very interesting and will be putting it into practice from now. She's had her final injections today and been chipped so is a bit touchy anyway.

Matt

 

[mattprince]

Hi,

Just to update. Shes worse if anything. Ive tried the advice given above and she has been slightly less nippy in general but far more viscous when she has gone mad. Its almost as though she loves being isolated with no attention, so thats no punishment when i take all forms of attention away from her when she nips. Shes just been growling, snarling, snapping, lurching to bite in the face when we tried to pick her up to take her for a bath (she had been in the garden and got totally covered in mud lol).

She is walked twice a day but in the evening she just doesn't want to walk and we are almost dragging her until we give in and take her home.

Really struggling

Matt

 

[mattprince]

Anyone?

 

[chalkie222]

As boring as it sounds consistency is key. Are you and all other family members on the same page? Are u reinforcing bluntly so it very clear getting the message across? Maybe try 10-15 min lightning lessons a number of times a day? Choose a quiet time/area with no distraction and pet her. Praise and reward the exact same second you get the desired behaviour. If she knows u have treats and she nips and u ignore she may want to please u even more and using the treats will help reinforce. Good luck x