Episode 11 - Biting Fingers When Taking Treats

Episode 11 - Biting Fingers When Taking Treats - Puppies with "Rough Mouths"

2/6/2024

When it rains it pours, and this week it’s pouring puppies who bite fingers when taking treats. We got FOUR posts on this topic this week!

The questions came from both puppy owners and breeders, and in this episode, I give you a fresh perspective on this “problem”:

Why puppies take treats roughly from hand
What you should do about it
Tips for working with puppies or dogs in groups

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

EPISODE 11 - TRANSCRIPT

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist, and this is a Puppy Culture potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

Well, when it rains, it pours. And this week it's raining puppies who take treats like piranhas. We got this question four times on our different groups this week from both breeders and puppy owners. So I'm going to read you a sample that's representative of all the posts that we got.

I have a litter of seven week old puppies and they're doing great with Puppy Culture, manding, free stack, self-control and so on. Really great puppies, but they get really excited the second I'm giving a treat and snap like piranhas at my fingers and the food.

Well, it's something we have to teach puppies. Okay? We we have to teach puppies how to take food from our fingers.

It's a tutorial issue. It's not something that we have to stop them from biting us or teach them somehow. That biting is bad. It's more just a question of physically teaching them the mechanical skill of taking a treat from a human being's fingers.

So let me put this into perspective for you. From from the puppies perspective. Puppies do not have the fine motor skills, nor do they have the learned behavior of taking treats from a human's fingers.

When you first take a treat and bring it down to your puppy to feed the puppy, first of all, the puppy just gets this huge scent cloud right there, just like, wow, there's all this excitement coming down, like there's a scent cloud. The puppy doesn't have a lot of useful vision. And even if they did, puppies do not rely on vision at this point.

Okay? So they just, they, their, they know there's food, there's excitement about the food. They're not really sure where it is. So they're just going to kind of start grabbing. And then if you snap away your finger quickly or are not very careful to actually place the food in the puppy's mouth, you get this action of the puppy kind of getting desperate, excited, aroused, unable to find the food, unable to locate the food, and they start snapping at and grabbing whatever's there, which is your fingers and the food.

Okay. I have never encountered a puppy that took treats roughly from hand that this was not the case. Okay. Where I could not in a very short period of time and I'm going to tell you how I do it.

Show that puppy how to take treats gently from hand and completely eliminate, you know, any problem. But the problem is if you don't, if you haven't addressed this when they're puppies, it becomes a learned behavior.

Okay. And that's where you get adults that draw blood when when you go to give them treats and can have hard mouths. Because if they never learn the skill of taking treats from hand, you know, now you're into a different territory. And I'm not going to address that today because it's on a different level. I mean, you might have to wear gloves.

It could be a longer process, but I am going to address exactly how you deal with this in puppies.

Okay. So let's go back to our puppy sitting there in the scent cloud with all that exciting food smell. And they're really unable to locate that food. And if you don't believe me about how little puppies use their eyesight to locate food ... if you are part of our Newborn to New Home breeder course, we have a video up there of a puppy doing scent work.

And it's a it's a piece of food on a plate in plain sight in front of the puppy. And you put the puppy five inches from it and the puppy actually sniffs. You can see him sniffing along the ground on to the plate, moving away from the food, even though it's right in front of his eyes and locating it just with his sense of smell.

Now, if you're not in that breeder course and you don't have access to that video, make your own. Set up your phone camera video on a little tripod, put a plate on the ground with a piece of food on it, and put your puppy about six inches away and watch. You're going to see that that puppy uses his nose to find that food.

When you look back at that film and slow it down, you're going to see what I'm talking about. So really, you think you bring this treat down, it's so obvious. It's right in front of their face. They're not seeing it. Okay? They're working blind and they have to, you have to give them a chance to narrow down that scent cloud and figure out where that food is.

Number one, you're going to do this without any other dog or puppy around, because that definitely can add to the excitement and franticness of the puppy because they, they're competing with the other puppies or the other dogs or they're afraid one of the other animals is going to get it. So it slows down the learning process and they just start grabbing.

So number one, you're always going to do this alone. That's your first tip. Number two, you are going to hold that treat a fairly large size for your puppy. Okay? You're going to hold it between your thumb and your index finger and you are going to slowly bring it right down in front of your puppy and almost push it into your puppy's mouth a little bit.

Okay. And you are going to hold your finger still until that puppy takes that food out from between your fingers and you're going to allow them to take it out of your fingers and keep your fingers there for just a second afterwards. Okay. So the puppy can slowly understand what has to be done. Now, you might have to use a pretty big treat to start out with to avoid being bitten.

But most puppies, if they're, if you're working one on one with them and you bring your hand down slowly to their level, push it in toward their muzzle and hold your hand still, they will just gently take that treat out of your finger. They're going, they're going to figure it out pretty soon. If you cannot have success with that, I would say this is, you know, a two B, you could use a meatball.

Okay. A raw I use a raw hamburger meatball. You can hold the puppy in one, one arm, hold the meatball in the other, and just bring it into their face. Okay, so you're holding the puppy so the puppy can't wiggle away and get too far away and get confused. And you're going to bring that meatball right in and let them take a bite of that meatball and then take your hand away.

It's just a way to have something bigger that you can break off into pieces and not get bitten. Okay. So now you've slowly taken that nice sized treat. You've brought it right down to the puppy's level and almost pushed the treat into the puppy's mouth. You're going to do that a few times, okay? You're going to have sessions of just doing that until that you see that that puppy, when you hold that treat just about an inch from that puppy's nose, that the puppy can sort of locate that treat, find it and pluck it from your fingers.

This is what we call our take a treat protocol. And it you know, it's something that I never really realized that breeders didn't know that they had to do, shall I say. And so I added, added it after Puppy Culture. But we do do this now and I do recommend it if you're a puppy owner to just work, it seems like a fluff protocol, but just work on the skill of the puppy taking the treat from your fingers.

Now I'm going to put in here at this juncture, what do people often recommend for puppies with rough mouths when they take treats? Put it on a fork, And, you know, I think it's a little bit misleading because you think, oh, yeah, well, they're going to put it on a fork and then they'll get poked if they bite hard and they're going to learn, you know, that it hurts and therefore they won't bite hard anymore.

But that's not what's going on. What's going on is you can hold the fork still and you're not afraid of getting your fingers bitten. So you can hold it there and allow the puppy the latitude to learn how to navigate that scent cloud and get to that treat and take it off the fork. I mean, they really don't have any desire to bite hard.

I mean, it's it's extra expended energy. They don't, it's not a default that they're going to bite hard. But when they're panicked, excited, want to grab the food and don't have the tutorial skills to get the food, this is what they're going to do. So by all means, if you're just really worried about getting bitten, you can start with this treat on a fork.

But again, the fork should be stuck still and right at the level of the puppy. And because all you're doing is teaching the puppy how to navigate to that treat.

Okay, next tip, common mistake that, we all do it. Okay. Puppy owners, breeders. I find myself, I always have to remind myself about this. When you are working with a puppy and you are click treating them for a behavior, allow them the time to finish chewing before you move off.

So if, for instance, you're teaching heeling, you click, you treat for the puppy being in the magic circle and then wait. Watch the puppy. Slowly bring your hand down, put your fingers right in front of his muzzle. Allow him to get the treat and watch him and allow him to finish chewing and swallowing and then move on. Okay, that quick dart of here, take the food and then run it.

So it creates a little bit of panic in the puppy, okay, because they're grabbing, they're trying to swallow quickly. They can't they really can't walk and chew gum at the same time yet.

So slow everything down. Give the puppy a chance to finish chewing, then move off. If you're teaching a stationary, even behavior like down or sit or you're luring or whatever you're doing before you initiate the next repetition, allow the puppy to finish chewing.

Again, with young puppies, and I would say under 16 weeks old, I have never yet encountered one that did not respond well in immediately to what I just described.

Now, there's a slightly different issue when you are working in a group, because sometimes you are working in a group, sometimes you're working in a group for instance, if you are a puppy owner and you're teaching dogs to wait their turn to get treats, which again we cover in our puppy owner course.

So I'm not going to go over these protocols, but they you will sometimes be working in groups. Okay. Number one, I recommend that you work on this separately and the puppy has a soft mouth and good treat taking before you proceed to working in a group. Okay, same thing for breeders. There are group exercises that we do teaching puppies to work, you know, display behaviors in a group.

However, I do recommend that you have done take a treat and done all this soft mouth work beforehand before you proceed to working in a group. And if you do have one that's working, taking treats hard when you're working in a group, I recommend, you know, you cut your engines, take that puppy out of the group, work with that puppy a little again, and then try a little bit later again in the group.

Okay. But that all having been said, the excitement of being in a group can make puppies and dogs grab food hard. In fact, that's one of your best indicators of your animal's internal state is how how rough their mouth is. Okay. They get they tend to get more rough and tighter in the jaw and rake your fingers more as they're more aroused.

And being in a group often will arouse them for all the reasons we talked about. Now, what do you do? What I recommend is a tactile marker. If you are in our Newborn to New Home breeder group, we do cover tactile markers, but for you that are not, I will briefly describe it, which is instead of a click, you power up a touch on the head.

Okay? Or it could be a touch on the shoulder. It could be, but it's a tactile marker. So you tap the puppy instead of clicking the puppy. I find that for me, doing a tap just on the cheek on the side of the face works better. Sometimes I'll do the top of the head, but the top of the head can be trickier to get to.

It just seems to be easier to tap just sort of on the cheek on the side and I power it up just like I power up the clicker. I do that feed, do that feed, do that feed. Then when you're in a group, you can tap the puppy that's going to get the treat and feed that puppy. And you will be shocked at how calm the entire group becomes.

Well, I hope that helped you guys. It seems like it's an epidemic this week. I imagine, you know, it's the middle of winter and probably that doesn't help either. So possibly if you are seeing this spring up suddenly and the weather's been bad and maybe your puppy's around a little bit tight, one final thing I might throw out there is perhaps doing some scent work or some kind of game.

You know, if you can't get outside and take a walk, if you can get outside and take a walk, that's great. But you know, anything you can do to sort of bring down the temperature a little bit on those puppies is also going to make this go easier.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our Puppy Owner Course available at madcapuniversity.com. If you're a breeder, check out our breeder course also available at madcapuniversity.com.

Well that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.