Should you rough play with your dog?

Wrestling will not lead to aggression, but dogs who are going to wrestle with their owners do need to learn bite inhibition. If you teach your dog bite inhibition, your dog may bite if something bad happens to her, but when she does it is not going to cause as much damage as the bite of a dog who does not know how to control herself. So can you wrestle with your dog? Of course you can. All it takes is a little training time. Your dog needs to learn when it is okay to wrestle and when it is not. It is okay when you say it is! It is never okay for the dog to start the wrestling match. A dog can be taught to understand when he is given the signal to wrestle.

Roughhousing with our dog is a personal choice. If we’re not training for a specific task, in which speed of reaction and hard actions are needed, like in police work, playing with the dog this way could have disastrous consequences for a person with limited mobility. When we roughhouse with our dog, because we’re not dogs, we don’t master the rules of play and will often bring the excitement level out of control. We’re responsible for our dog’s behavior during their entire life. When a dog is allowed to play with humans like they would with rambunctious dogs, we take the chance that the dog may react in the same way with other people. We’re teaching the dog that humans are fun playmates to wrestle with and jump on. If we still chose to roughhouse with our dog, a few rules will help keep the situation under control: Put the behavior on cue and don’t encourage it when the dog initiates roughhousing without the cue. Keeping everybody safe, the family, the visitors and the dog should always be the priority when making the decision to roughhouse or not. The dog will not always know the difference and understand when it’s alright to play this way or when it’s not. Certain movements that we make or things that we say, that are similar to those used during roughhousing could trigger rough responses from the dog. Just like children, dogs need us to be consistent. If one moment we’re allowing jumping and mouthing, we can’t expect them to understand that just because we’re now wearing expensive work clothes, that behavior will no longer be tolerated. Any behavior that has the potential to hurt a person can lead to injuries or lawsuits and the dog will pay the consequences. The question becomes: how important is it for us to roughhouse?