Training Help!
My Ginger (15 weeks) is a sweetheart, and generally a very good, very smart dog, but I'm haivng issues with 2 things.
The first is biting. I've read a hundred posts on here about yelping loudly and then turning away when the puppy bites, but this doesn't work with Ginger. When she gets mad at us, or thinks we aren't giving her enough attention she will randomly walk up and bite our hands. And she bites hard. I've gone through a box of bandaids in the last 2 weeks! We've tried making the loud yelp, turning away, leaving the room, putting her in her kennel, telling her no biting in a stern voice, popping her nose, lightly holding her muzzle while we tell her no biting, but as soon as we come back the first thing she does is wrinkles up her nose and tries to bite our hands again. I'm at my witts end.
Also, how do you teach a dog to "lay down"? She learned sit without even trying. But I can't for the life of me teach her "lay down". I make the hand motion and she just stares at me. I try to lay her down and she bites me. Lately I've been putting a treat in my hand and putting that on the floor while telling her to lay down and all she does is dig at my hand. Any time she's already laying down I make sure to say "lay down" and then tell her "good girl" but she just doesn't get it.
Any input on these 2 things would be greatly appreciated.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Bev Levy on
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I am assuming she is still pretty young. When her teeth touch your skin Yelp a high pitched, dramatic (think-you are killing me) screech. If she continues use a time out. Do you have a room you can close her up in for a few minutes? Preferably not her crate. All fun must stop when she bites. It takes persistence but if you stick to it she will stop.
For laying down there are a lot of methods but I just said down and took their feet and brought them down. Izzy was easy but Sparty took some work. Again fun repetition works best. Have a good time with her, puppyhood passes very quickly!
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Permalink Reply by Jane on
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Have you looked into doing a puppy class with her? Having the advice of a trainer is always helpful, and maybe interacting with other puppies would help her bite inhibition. When you say she wrinkles her nose, is she actually raising her lip at you/showing her teeth and then intentionally biting you? That would worry me a bit. I can't recall either of my dogs ever actually breaking the skin hard enough to require a bandaid as puppies, but maybe I was just lucky. With my pem, the yelping method only made him more excited. Ignoring him or putting him on a time out was much more effective since he was very people oriented.
For down, I had a really hard time with my cardi puppy. Eventually what I did was put him on a slippery tile floor, and then take the treat and push it down to the ground AND towards him, so he almost had to back up to get to it. Since he was on the tile floor, his back feet slid easily and he would lay down to get the treat. The other method that worked for my pem was to sit on the ground with legs extended, knees slightly bent. Put the treat under your knees so the puppy has to lay down to fit under your knees, kind of like going through a tunnel.
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Permalink Reply by Melissa and Franklin! on
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I had a german shepherd who used to bite a lot as a puppy and we rescued her at 5 weeks old so she didn't learn good puppy manners from her siblings. The only thing that worked to stop the biting was to roll her upper lip under so essentially she was biting her lip. We had to do this and press until she released the bite and when she went back to bite again we did it again and eventually she learned that biting hurt her and she quit doing it.
Corgis are REALLY hard to teach the down command because they are so short and stubby. Best way to do it is put a treat in your hand and lower it to the ground, you may need to apply slight pressure towards the shoulder area with your other hand and slowly pull the treat away still on the ground, this encourages them to lay down instead of stand up or go into a sit. One really important thing is DONT USE A VOICE COMMAND. You don't want to use a voice command until the dog is doing the behavior you want about 80% of the time. You lure them into a down and say good and give them the treat but don't introduce the word down until they are successfully laying down when you ask with the treat almost every time. This is because if you start saying down from the beginning they start to associate down with the wrong behavior, like in your case possibly associating down with pawing and biting your hand, so in training NEVER introduce a word to a behavior until you are getting that behavior regularly. Once the wrong behavior is taught for the word it is almost impossible to unteach that behavior
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Permalink Reply by John Wolff on
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Palm the treat, put palm firmly on floor, trapping the treat, let her dig at your hand but don't let her get it until her body is flat on the floor, then praise. What Melissa say about NOT saying "down" until she's down sounds reasonable.
i have similar problem with "sit". They'll sit, but as reluctantly as a truculent teenager.
The biting sounds like a potentially more serious problem. If she bit somebody's child....? Better get some good advice on this and deal with it quickly.
I'm guessing the litter was separated maybe 8 or 10 weeks? They say bite inhibition is learned in the litter by around 10 or 12 weeks. Dunno if that's true. We got Al at 12 weeks and biting was never an issue at all.
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Permalink Reply by Jen on
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Thanks for all of the advice! We've been working on laying down by me sliding the treat towards her on a slippery surface. She is now starting to lay down as soon as I put my hand down so I'm going to start incorporating "lay down" with it soon.
As for the biting, she's getting better, but I don't think it's because of anything we've been doing, sad to say. Sometimes she's just cranky!
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