For example, if your dog likes to grab your clothes or hands or just plain bites at you during play, teach him to grab one of his toys instead. After all, dogs bite and chew on each other and one will let the other one know when the biting is too hard. And, of course, biting is unacceptable for many other reasons. Children need to know that they cannot play rough; wrestling, fighting type games with the dog as these encourage the dog to fight back.
When play gets too rough, someone will get hurt. Hide and seek games let the child hide and encourage the dog to find him , find it games hide toys or treats and encourage kids and dog to find them , and retrieving games are much better than rough games.
Until taught differently, your dog will play with your children as he did his littermates. Those games are rough, rowdy, wrestling games or chase and catch games; neither of which are appropriate for kids.
That means you need to help your kids play better games with the dog and you need to supervise their playtimes. When your older dog wants to play, let him set the tone of the play. However, when your old dog gets tired and has had enough, help him stop the play.
Move the puppy away, give them each something to chew on, take the puppy for a walk, or put the older dog in another room for a nap. As your puppy grows up and gets bigger and your old dog ages, run interference for him. With the exception of frequent rear-ups in which they adopted identical roles, facing one another and boxing with their front paws , Sage usually maintained the more assertive role neck biting, pinning, slamming and so forth.
Yet, because Sam was always an enthusiastic partner, we let them continue to play together. With Sage and Sam, allowing play to continue was the right decision. Their early play interactions burgeoned into a lifelong friendship. Even today, the two middle-aged boys will sometimes play together for five hours at a stretch, stopping only occasionally for brief rests. When they are finally done, they often lie together, completely relaxed, with their bodies touching. Their faces are loose and smiling, and they seem almost drunk in an endorphin-induced haze.
This relationship shows that play does not necessarily have to be fair or balanced in order for two dogs to want to play with one another. Scientists thought that if one dog was too rough or forceful e. Until our research, this proposition was never empirically tested. Over a year period, we studied pair-wise play between adult dogs, between adult dogs and adolescents , and between puppy littermates. Dogs do not need to take turns being assertive in order for play to take place.
Safi, a female German Shepherd, and Osa, a male Golden Retriever mix, were best friends for many years. When they played, they snarled a lot, lips curled and teeth exposed. The snarls looked fierce, but they often preceded silly behaviors, like flopping on the ground. Then, as though on cue, Safi and Osa would put their scary faces back on, almost as if they were Halloween masks, and turn toward one another. Their expressions were so exaggerated and obviously fake that they always made us laugh.
Some dogs can even be trained to show a snarl on command in a context that is otherwise perfectly friendly. These observations show that dogs can exhibit nasty faces voluntarily, just as we do when we are only pretending to be mean.
Growling , like snarling , is a seemingly aggressive behavior that means something different during play than it does in other contexts. We have often videotaped play between another female Shepherd, Zelda, and a male mixed-breed, Bentley. When watching these tapes, we noticed that, following brief pauses in play, Zelda often stared at Bentley and growled fiercely. Whenever she did this, Bentley leaped toward her and the chase was on. Bentley moved toward rather than away from Zelda because he knew her growl was not real.
This phenomenon was also noted by other researchers, who recorded growls from dogs in three different contexts, including play 4. Play growls have different acoustical properties than growls given as threats, and when researchers played the growls back, dogs distinguished between play growls and growls given in agonistic i.
I use this socialization checklist from Dr. Sophia Yin. Aggression between puppies that are raised together is quite common as they hit social maturity. Kayla grew up in northern Wisconsin and studied ecology and animal behavior at Colorado College. She founded Journey Dog Training in to provide high-quality and affordable dog behavior advice.
Aside from running Journey Dog Training, Kayla also runs the nonprofit K9 Conservationists , where she and the dogs work as conservation detection dog teams. Hi, I just got a 6 week old and 8 week old American Bulldog male and female. They play well together but rough and will growl and shake each other till one yelps. Is this normal play? That is pretty normal. However, 6 weeks old is quite young to be leaving the parents and littermates — and raising sibling puppies like this is a huge challenge for many people!
Make sure you check out other puppy resources here for help. We just adopted two puppies, 10 and 12 weeks old. My 10 week old is growing fast and at 15 lbs while the 12 weeks old is a feisty 5 lb. This results in them not having much if any play time. Bullying or overdependence is very common if you let them spend too much time together.
My downstairs neighbors and i got puppies, now 11 weeks old, from the same litter 3 weeks ago. Is this an appropriate approach until they are old enough to socialize with other dogs? We share a yard where both dogs like to play. If the situation is getting too intense, then it is best to remove the dog for a time-out session.
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