Puppies are really small bundles of fun that can be a real joy to have. But there will be inevitable times when your dog will behave rather unruly and troublesome. Having your pup develop unwanted behavior can be a real pain because this can cause your dog to perform very annoying things like randomly biting on things inside the house or scratching their paws on different surfaces and even loud barking on the people they get a sight on. If you want to prevent your dog from having worse behaviors, you should be sure to take the time and a lot of effort to change your puppy for the better.
To try and improve your pup’s behavioral issues, you should first be familiar with the common bad behaviors your dog is doing. Here are some of the most common ones and ways to deal with them
1. Biting
Pups that are a few weeks old love to play with each other and their mouth can be one of the most common things they use to play with other dogs. And so they develop this behavior of biting to elicit playfulness. They also get a bit physical when they wrestle with other pups. When you play with your dog and actually let them bite or wrestle you playfully, you are actually incentivizing them to continue developing their bad behaviors. Soon if we continue letting this happen, their bite strength might get stronger when they grow older and eventually may hurt us.
To prevent this bad habit from continuing, you can give your dog an alternative biting thing. This could be dog toys or a bone. You can also train your dog to not bite you by playing games like tug of war and fetch.
2. Random Chewing
Dog’s explore the world through their mouths and noses. They have a really keen sense of smell a lot stronger than ours. So if they find something interesting with their sense of smell, they will immediately put it in their mouth to examine it more. This will usually involve a lot of chewing in their part.
Much like with biting, we can divert our pup’s attention to different toys that are specifically made for them to chew. These designated chewing toys can also teach them the right and safe way to chew objects, with your supervision of course. You should actively teach them what things they can chew and point out the ones that they should not.
3. Springing on people
When they are still with other puppies, these little pooches love to play by jumping on one another, and this can develop into a very unwanted behavior when they grow up. It will be very troublesome to have your dog jump on a random stranger or different things inside the house.
To stop developing this behavior, there can be some things you can do. You can try and punish them a little bit when they jump on you. Discourage them from doing this.
