02/16/2023
Please. For the love of dogs everywhere, stop taking everything out of your puppies mouth. You’re often creating more problems than you’re solving.
Puppies put everything in their mouths the way newly crawling or walking babies do. It’s the age of exploration and discovery and inquisitive little minds with teething little mouths means everything must be tasted. This is 100% normal developmental behavior. It shouldn’t be punished or discouraged.
When we sn**ch things out of their mouths, or chase them or grab it away from them, we run the risk of several issues, the top two being -
1. We teach our puppy that anything they have could be lost the second a human comes near, and that can very quickly snowball into resource guarding - which is already a natural behavior - but we are actually just encouraging it by validating to our puppy that they lose things when we are around. This is especially true in homes with children and toys out all the time. Then this spirals into all kinds of relationship issues down the road.
2. We can teach our puppy the best thing they can do is INHALE the item so they don’t lose it. This gets dangerous and ugly very quickly. It can also create puppies and dogs to then not even think but just grab consume.
Leaves, sticks, grass, mud, dust bunnies, socks (depending on your puppies size), shoes, all the things within reach are fair game for mouthing and chewing on. And yes, I let my puppies explore them all. Their teeth and jaws at this infantile stage aren’t going to do extreme harm to an item right now, so go head and feel what a shoe sole feels like, get it out of your system. If I don’t want certain things explored, I keep those things out of reach, end of story. Management and supervision is key to safety at this age. Baby gates, playpens, even only pottying in areas of the yard where there’s no gravel. The ONLY things I will readily tackle my puppy over is medicine and/or broken glass. Everything else, even if it’s something I truly don’t want them to have, like a pair of underwear or a doll, I take my time in retrieving it, but more often than not, the puppy will spit it out anyway and move on to graze on the next thing they can find, especially if I toss something more interesting nearby. (Drop that stick to come chase this leaf on the ground)
The majority of puppies will explore the item with their mouth, shred it if they can, then move on to something else to repeat this process with. IF they consume any of it, it’s usually very minor and they will p**p it out later. We have to remember dogs have been existing for 18,000 years, 80% of them still living the way they always have, and going through this stage just fine, our human interventions are not always needed, even though we mean well and are trying to help.
Of course there are exceptions to this, and in those cases we have other solutions, but the majority of puppies I see exploring with their mouths DONT a need hands constantly grabbing them and removing it out of their jaws. If you find yourself doing that all the time, it may be on YOU to manage the environment better!
This process combines with the work we teach in all our puppy classes of having a puppy HAPPY to have you approach them when they are enjoying something in their mouth. We call it the “exchange game” where we teach how to trade. But we also teach the puppy we don’t always take it away either. This helps puppies feel safe in letting you take something from them by learning they won’t ALWAYS lose it.
So, long story short, let your puppy - puppy. Grab a leaf, lay in the grass and shred it. Then find a stick to chew on. We have to get better at picking our battles with dogs if we are both as a species going to enjoy our time together.
Editing this post to add - I’d hope it would be obvious but apparently it’s not, so please know in no way shape or form am I encouraging or saying it’s okay to let your puppy chew or mouth dangerous objects or to leave them unsupervised in places that may have serious objects in them. Environments have to be managed just the same way they are for babies, as I mentioned above, and puppies/dogs need to be supervised. I am however, stating that we have to stop helicoptering around puppies that are just being puppies in order to help alieviate some of the behavior problems that develop from not the managing itself; but the micro managing.
