Chewing is an inevitable part of owning a puppy. With patience and consistency, these 5 rules will improve your chew training.
Chewing is an inevitable part of dog ownership. Chewing provides dogs stimulation, allows them to learn about their environments and in the case of a puppy facilitates the teething process. Chew training a puppy is a process that requires patience and faith that your efforts will be rewarded.
When I began chew training my 10 week old Border Collie Brix, I remember feeling that her relentless chewing would never end. She had focused on pant legs, and despite my efforts to redirect her attention, she would immediately return to sink those needle-like puppy teeth into my jeans.
Now, as a 6 year old Brix never chews a single thing besides her frisbee and it has been that way for a long time. Chew training works if you are patient and consistent with your dog. Let’s start with some rules of chew training:
5 Rules Of Chew Training Your Puppy
- Puppies will chew, accept it
- Redirect your puppy’s chewing
- Correct, never punish
- There is no punishment after the fact
- Chew mistakes are your mistakes, not your dog’s
The puppy will chew, deal with it
The main lesson of this article is this: Your puppy will chew and there is not a darn thing you can do about it. Your job as her handler is to direct that behavior to an appropriate place and time.
Humans take dexterity – our ability to do fine motor work with our hands – for granted. Most humans find it difficult to imagine not being able to explore our worlds without the use of our hands.
Dogs have virtually zero dexterity in their paws. Just watch any dog try to wrangle a tennis ball with their paw. You will find that they are little better than a club at the end of their leg.
For that reason, dogs utilize their mouths to get what they want. Not only that, but their sensitive noses are positioned right next to the mouth, making chewing a highly stimulating activity.
There is no way to stop a puppy from chewing outright, so don’t even try. The process of puppy chew training begins with accepting that fact. The rest comes down to patience and consistency on your part.
Redirect
As a new puppy owner, you will need to become a master of redirecting your puppy’s drive to chew. Throughout your apartment, you should have chew toys positioned at the ready. When your pup goes after your jacket sleeve, a rug or the end of your couch, it is your job to quickly and calmly redirect the dog to chew something appropriate.
To do this, just calmly use your hand to push the puppy’s mouth away from the couch or rug, and immediately plop a chew toy in her mouth. I mean immediately. The goal is to make it seem like the chew toy was there in the first place. You engaging in play with the chew toy will make it seem far more fun than the couch. We’ve found that rope toys are the most attractive to divert a puppy attention.
Advanced tip:
The goal in this exercise is to make the couch or whatever the puppy is not supposed to be chewing seem like the most boring thing. You do this by not tying any reaction – positive or negative – to the action of chewing. If everytime you respond, “Hey! No!” or jump up quickly when puppy chews the couch, then what you’ve taught the pup is that everytime she chews the couch, she gets her owner’s attention. Your action around the chew should be quiet and calm, almost boring.
Correct, never punish
Punishment in dog training is one of the counterproductive things that a trainer can do. Yelling, leash tugging or hitting will really only make you seem untrustworthy and unpredictable to your dog. Too much punishment and your dog will literally sour them, and you will find any future training very difficult to achieve. This usually causes inexperienced handlers to grow even more frustrated and often escalates punishment.
Correct, not punish
Correction, on the other hand, differs from punishment because it opens your dog up to a learning experience. There is nothing wrong with correcting a dog. In the example above, the calm and quiet use of your hands to redirect the puppy away from chewing the couch is the correction.
Plopping a chew toy in her mouth is the lesson. Do this enough times and not only will your dog come to trust you, but they will learn that they are only allowed to chew certain things because they learned that chewing the wrong items is just not worth their time.
A note on being human:
Our urge to communicate vocally with other humans is so ingrained in us that most dog owners find it almost impossible not to do the same with their dog. You should know that your dog is reading every single inflection in your voice, and the emotions that you express – even unconsciously – in your voice are perceived by your dog. If you choose to use your voice to correct your dog, be very careful! After having to correct your puppy dozens of times, you may lose your temper and yell a very angry or frightening “No!” when you really intended to be calm. It’s very hard to train humans to use their voices calmly and consistently.
Physical corrections are a great way to communicate to your dog in a calm way. By physical, I do not mean hitting, pinching, ear grabbing, flicking, leash tugging or anything else that may be perceived as unpleasant or painful to your dog. If you are unsure whether your physical corrections are too harsh, just try it out on yourself and see how you like it.
Physical corrections are emotionless gestures that communicate to a dog that what they are doing is not right. Redirecting a puppy’s mouth from chewing is a calm and clear way to communicate to her that she needs to stop. Training yourself to be able to use physical corrections appropriately will take a lot of time and observation of yourself.
There is not punishing a sin committed
Let’s say you left the living room for a moment, maybe to change clothes or use the bathroom and you return to find your pup has chewed a small hold in your favorite couch pillow. What are you feeling? Angry? Yeah, that’s understandable. Disappointed? Sure, maybe you’re disappointed in your pup, or more appropriately in yourself for having left your puppy in a situation where she was able to chew the couch.
Whatever you are feeling when you return to the scene of the crime, you need to remember that that error, in the mind of the dog, is long gone. That means that any correction, or worse any punishment, that comes after the fact will appear to come out of nowhere to your dog.
The Dog’s Mind
Dogs, and especially puppies, live moment to moment. They do not have the ability to tie past actions to current repercussions. If your puppy chewed a couch pillow 10 minutes before, they will have no way of understanding that you are punishing them for that. Instead, what the puppy perceives of you is that you are fairly unpredictable and are prone to snap for no reason at all. Give it enough time and your dog will learn not to trust you.
If you observe the way that dogs interact with one another, they are quite adept at quickly correcting inappropriate behaviors of other dogs. If one dog eats another’s meal, they don’t go back 10 minutes later and bite them to communicate “Hey! You ate my food!” It just doesn’t happen. But if a dog attempts to eat another dog’s food right in front of them, then they will quickly send a signal that that will not fly.
The best thing you can do if you’ve found that your puppy chewed something in the house, is literally nothing at all. You have to train yourself to think “Ok, I messed up on that one. I need to be more vigilant next time.” This leads to the last rule of chew training: Chew mistakes are your mistakes, not your dogs
Chew mistakes are your mistakes, not your dog’s
We have already established that chewing is an inevitable part of a puppy’s development. We can also fairly say that a young puppy has the mental maturity and reasoning skills of…well of a puppy. You cannot expect a young puppy to immediately learn your bizarre rules after one or two times of telling. Your dog, in their own puppy way will be wondering “Ok, so I can’t chew the square pillow on the couch, but I can chew the squirrel shaped pillow you bought from the pet store?” It just doesn’t make sense, so it will take a lot of time to shape that behavior.
Until then, you cannot blame chew mistakes on the puppy. It is unfair to them, and it is frankly incorrect. If your 10 week old puppy chews your couch pillow while you were in the bathroom, you’d best just go back in the bathroom, look in the mirror and say “Bad owner!”
Patience, consistency and having a good replacement chew toy at the ready are the best way to train your apartment pup not to chew. It will be frustrating at times, but it won’t last forever, we promise. Remember the rules.
5 Rules Of Chew Training Your Puppy
- Puppies will chew, just accept it
- Redirect your puppy’s attention
- Correct, never punish
- There is no punishment after the fact
- Chew mistakes are your mistakes, not your dog’s
If you need more help, this book is a fantastic resource for raising puppies:
This post includes affiliate links. We receive commissions based on sales off of affiliate links. We only post links to products or services we have personally used and trust.