Is it okay to play rough with your puppy?

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. 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. So can you wrestle with your dog, of course you can. All it takes is a little training time.

Puppies can play rough. Puppy play consists of chasing, pouncing, barking, growling and biting. Although normal play can become intense, it’s important to be able to distinguish normal from abnormal behavior. In normal play, a puppy may bow, present its front and side to the owner, wag its tail, dart back and forth, emit high pitched barks and growls, and spontaneously attack people or objects. Generally, its ears will be up and its mouth will be open and relaxed. Puppies less than 12 weeks of age that react to pain or fear by growling or snapping are responding abnormally.

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. 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 develop those needed drives. If we’re not, we have to fully understand what behaviors we are encouraging and what consequences could occur over time. 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. Keeping everybody safe, the family, the visitors and the dog should always be the priority when making the decision to roughhouse or not.

When we allow puppies to roughhouse with each other, especially with larger puppies they quickly move from lighthearted play to sparring and mock battle. What they are doing is reverting/regressing to sibling behaviors that encourage competition and bringing down one’s opponent. You can tell when a puppy is about to go ballistic during play. His energy level will become increasingly intense and explosive. As his brain fills with adrenaline he quickly moves into a state he cannot change or stop. This is when play turns to sparring and mock battle, when the competition starts to feel too real and puppies (like dogs) slip into fight mode. The downside of allowing your puppy to roughhouse with another puppy, a grown dog, or a person is that once he’s learned rough play is permissible it’s challenging to teach him to stop. Better to teach your pup how to be calm, learn a new way to interact, and throttle back with those sharp weapons. If you listen to the vocalizations of both participants it can sound like mortal combat, nevertheless, when it comes to puppies these are the sounds that tell you it’s well past time to break things up, take a time out, and have your puppy do something else.

With puppies, this is rarely aggressive behavior in which the intent is to do harm. The goals of working with this normal puppy behavior are to redirect your puppy’s desire to put something in her mouth onto acceptable chew toys and to teach her to be gentle when a hand is in her mouth. You must also teach your puppy to be gentle with hands, and that nipping results in unpleasant consequences for her. Teach your puppy that nipping turns off any attention and social interaction with you. After a nip, look your puppy right in the eye, and yell, “Ouch!” as though you’ve been mortally wounded, then ignore her. Never play tug-of-war or wrestling games with your puppy if you’re having a nipping problem. These types of games encourage out-of-control behavior, grabbing, lunging and competition with you. At first, you may need to pet or scratch your puppy for short periods of time, since the longer she’s petted, the more likely she is to get excited and start to nip. Attempts to suppress it or stop it are unlikely to be successful unless you give your puppy an alternative behavior. Remember that any of these three methods will probably not be effective unless you work hard to teach your puppy the right behavior by offering her an acceptable chew toy. Nipping and mouthing hands can also be discouraged by loosely holding your puppy’s lower jaw between your thumb and forefinger after she’s taken your hand in her mouth. A third alternative is to wear cotton gloves coated with a substance with an unpleasant taste such as Bitter Apple. For this method to work, every time she nips your hand she must experience this bad taste. Attempts to tap, slap or hit your puppy in the face for nipping or jumping up are almost guaranteed to backfire.