# Biting and jumping up!



## leopowell (Oct 11, 2019)

Hi there,
I have just joined the forum! I have a 14 week old puppy called Leo - it is the first time that I have owned a dog... so fun and scary at the same time.... because I have always owned cats... Leo is lovely apart from when he is biting and jumping up. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. I read on your forum about pushing your hand gently into his mouth which I tried this morning x


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## LucyJ (Sep 30, 2019)

leopowell said:


> Hi there,
> I have just joined the forum! I have a 14 week old puppy called Leo - it is the first time that I have owned a dog... so fun and scary at the same time.... because I have always owned cats... Leo is lovely apart from when he is biting and jumping up. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. I read on your forum about pushing your hand gently into his mouth which I tried this morning x


Hey, have you made any progress since your post? We have a 5 month old who used to do the same and these are the tips we were given after we paid for a private dog training session:

Jumping: 

If he jumps up, say your command (ours is “off” for people and furniture) and turn around so you’re not facing him. 

The first few times you do this he is likely to jump at your back or do some other form of attention seeking behaviour. But be consistent.

Once all 4 paws are on the floor turn back around and carry about what you were doing - no fuss for your boy but don’t completely ignore him.

If after turning around a few times he continues, calmly walk out of the room and shut the door/baby gate and go out of sight for 20 seconds - when you return no fuss but just carry about what you were doing.

Jumping up is a hard one to tackle with all puppies but Vs are very bouncy so stick with the above and after a few weeks you will see progress. 

With guests we get them to do the same process as above as we don’t want him jumping up at new guests. Before a guest comes in we take him to his designated spot where he must sit and stay until invited by the guest to come over. If he jumps up, the guest then follows the above process until he is calm with all 4 paws on the floor.

Biting:

We found this to be a big problem as even at 8 weeks, our V had a very powerful jaw. He wasn’t biting in aggression, just puppy mouthing but it was too much for us and any guest to handle. So we were told the following:

Some trainers say to put a toy in their mouth when they bite so they learn to bite toys not you. We disagreed with this because a toy is a reward and we didn’t want to reward the biting. 

Instead we would make an incredibly loud “argh” sound almost like a growl when he bit. If he immediately bit again or didn’t stop initially then we had a rattle made up of lose stones in a plastic bottle that we would shake once. The rattle was very loud and it would shock him out of biting. We didn’t look at him while shaking the rattle as we didn’t want him to think it was us making the noise but instead that when he bites and doesn’t listen, a loud sound happens from somewhere. To prevent the bad sound, he needs to stop biting. Within a week we saw massive progress. 

The rattle is literally a small plastic water bottle half filed with stones. You do one shake in one motion rather than shake it up and down and that is all you need. 

He only ignored the rattle once and so we left the room for 30s and came back in. Other than that we were rattle free within a week and the biting had completely stopped within 2! 

Hope that helps


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