Puppy Club Fact Sheets
Puppy Behavioural Problems
Introduction
Below are some of the more common problems you might encounter with your puppy. Remember the guidelines below are for mild problems, if you think your puppy may have a more serious problem or the guidelines below are not working please contact us.
Jumping Up
Jumping up is a natural behaviour in puppies. Puppies jump up and lick their mother's face on her return to the den to encourage her to regurgitate food for them. Greeting behaviour in all dogs involves face to face contact. Therefore it is not surprising that our puppies are keen to reach our faces and to do this they need to jump up. While this is cute when they are little, having a full grown dog leap for your face may be unnerving. It is worth putting in some effort while they are young to teach an alternative form of greeting.
The most important thing is to make sure you are not inadvertently rewarding the jumping up by responding to your puppy. Even pushing your puppy away and shouting at it may be construed as a reward. Instead ignore your puppy when it jumps up, the simplest way to do this is to turn your back. Train an alternative behaviour such as sitting, when it does this reward with food and close contact i.e. bend down so your puppy can check out your face.
Food Guarding
Guarding food is a sensible strategy in the wild where resources are scarce. However a dog that growls over its food bowl, can be scary and inconvenient if the food bowl is in a busy area. There are two ways of dealing with this:
- Put the food bowl somewhere quiet and leave the dog alone.
- Teach your puppy from a young age that people near its food bowl is a good thing by dropping treats into its bowl as you walk past, taking its bowl away and giving it back with extra treats and feeding the puppy with your hands in the food bowl.
Excessive Barking
All dogs bark occasionally, however problems arise when dogs bark for long periods of time causing annoyance for the owners and neighbours. Shouting, "QUIET" is not going to work. Your dog does not know what "quiet" means and shouting sounds just like barking so gets him more excited.
The easiest way to reduce barking is first to teach your puppy to bark on command and then teach him to be quiet. Choose a command word like speak, repeat this while praising him when he barks. Try to anticipate when he will start barking and say the word just before he starts.
Eventually saying the word will be enough to start him barking. Next teach him to be quiet. Get him barking, ask for quiet and show him a treat, and once he is quiet give him the treat. Practice lots in situations where you have asked him to bark, then moving on to times when he has started barking spontaneously.
