How To Play With Your Dog

play biting
training puppies not to bite

hyper time
puppies and
active behavior

puppies and their care, advice from a professional groomer

housebreaking

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What you need to know about playing with your dog

Want to learn how to play with your dog in a way that’ll encourage good behavior? This is the first in a series of articles about dog play. We’re starting with games you should avoid playing with your dog. Dog play can be a very important part of good behavior management. How you play with your dog or puppy can affect how it behaves during non playtimes. It’s through play that dogs and puppies learn how to interact with others. Through proper dog play your four footed friend will learn social rules and self control. A dog’s self control level can range from wild abandon to careful and considerate behavior. Play teaches your dog the boundaries of what’s acceptable and what is not. What’s acceptable and where the boundaries of behavior lie are what comprise the social and personal rules of the individual. For more information about social and personal rules consult my training book Best Friend learning Together.

With a dog training program adult dogs can learn to behave different than they were taught as pups. But it’s easier to teach good behavior right from the start. If you have a puppy you may want to read my article about how to play with a puppy. The exercises in this article will help teach a puppy not to do so much play biting.

We must remember that play is often a form of ritualized aggression. There can be times when play crosses the line from a ritualized behavior to something more serious. Fortunately most dogs don’t show overt aggression towards people. I define overt aggression as behavior meant to hurt or harm. When a dog does show a wiliness to attack or defend in a manner meant to harm it is serious and needs immediate remedial training.

Even how breed traits look can be change with the right experiences at the right time. The right time is usually during the sensitive periods of puppyhood. Often the right experiences involve constructive play, training, and learning self control. We need to carefully consider the influence of play and training during sensitive periods in our puppy’s lives. Experiences during early life can have lifelong affects.
Puppy playing

Dog Games to avoid

First we’ll look at several games I recommend you do not play with your dog or puppy. At least not until it has acquired some foundation skills from a training program. Some of these games you can use as training exercises once the dog has developed a solid foundation of necessary behaviors.

Tug of war
The first game I want to discourage is playing tug of war. I’ve read many places where playing tug will make the dog aggressive. I’m not convinced this is so. In theory it might. It’s much more likely playing tug will test for aggression than teach a dog to be aggressive. What playing tug does is puts your play partner in a situation where resource guarding will more easily show itself. If your dog aggressively guards its toy, playing tug will probably increase the aggression. For the average dog playing tug should not cause overt aggression.

Then why no playing tug? My dog loves to play tug of war, why can’t I play his favorite game? Well you can. We all make decisions about how we live with our pets. If you play tug with your dog it’s more likely to have problems biting the leash and tearing at cloth. Once a dog is taught playing tug is the best thing ever, it may want to play with objects you never thought of as toys. I have seen a lot of what pet owners call bad behavior because they taught their dogs to play tug.

Roughhousing
Roughhousing and wrestling with a dog is fun. However, rough play can teach your dog to be physically overbearing and overactive when socially stimulated. Active overbearing dogs can be quite comical if you know what you are looking at. They are scary to people who can’t read the dog. While I write this I am working with a rather large and powerful dog who was a big and hard to handle clown. That is, when I first met him. To everyone’s delight, and safety, he is now responding nicely to training and quite well mannered. When I first met this bounding mass of muscle he didn’t respond to any of the dog handling magic I use for calming dogs down. I can usually get a dog to calm down with the proper positioning and reinforcement. This dog had one way of responding for everything and that was grab, push, and jump. In fact any attention I gave him just made him more active and forceful in his actions. Some trainers will give you advice like, just ignore the dog. Have you ever tried ignoring 90 pounds of muscle grabbed onto your arm while bowling you over?

This is not the same dog I talk about in the article but it is a good example of working with a large and forceful dog.

Dog Chase Games
Playing dog chase games is probably not a good idea. That is until you can control your dog’s play biting and teach it to come on command. Most puppies and dog will also need to work through some form of avoidance response before chase games are appropriate. I especially discourage new pet owners from chasing new dogs or puppies. Chasing a new dog that’s already intimidated by its new surroundings can teach the dog to run away from people.

Teasing a puppy or dog with hands
Moving your hands quickly around a dog’s head is how you teach biting behavior. If you have a puppy you’ll feel the pain of a puppy’s needle sharp teeth, then you’ll understand why biting should be discouraged. If you have an adolescent or adult dog you may feel the power of a forceful grab, which can also be unpleasant.

Some games I suggest you play with your dog or puppy will be specifically designed to prevent biting. These games are really training exercise and will teach your dog not to bite at object moving about the head.

Chasing cats and small animals
I used to discourage this just because I thought it was good manners. It can also make working dogs more reliable around varying critters. It’s probably best if your tracking dog doesn’t come off a track to chase the squirrels.

However, now chasing cats can mean the difference between life and death. It doesn’t make much sense, but some city’s politicians have decided dogs that kill cats are dangerous dog. That is sort of like saying cats that kill rats are dangerous cats. Makes no sense but hey, do politicians need to make sense? If politicians knew a little about nature and were using common sense this would not be a law. Sure dog owners need to be responsible and not let their dogs needlessly kill others pets, but that is a different behavior and different law. Since politicians like making laws and don’t always think clearly we now need to include no cat chasing as a life threatening behavior problem. I imagine there are exceptions, I bet police dogs can kill whatever they want.

Improvised Puzzle Games
I discourage teaching your dog to solve puzzles to gain reinforcement. I know a lot of new age trainers like the dog to participate in a lot of puzzle solving and exploratory behavior. In general I do not. Sure you might have a smart dog, but is that really what you want? Do you want a dog that gets in the refrigerator whenever it wants a snack? Do you want a dog that lets itself out for a walk? A smart dog who has figured out the barrier puzzle can get into a lot of mischief. Barriers are there to prevent entrance to something or exit from something. If you have a barrier puzzle geniuses take extra measures to puppy/dog/child proof your house.

My cousin’s family taught their dog to solve interesting puzzles to get food. Then one day she noticed it operating and drinking out of the water cooler. When the dog was a puppy I warned them the puzzle solving games they played would eventually lead to the dog helping itself to food or other rewards.

If you play any of the games mentioned you need to make sure they are played with caution. When playing games that could teach unwanted behavior be constantly aware of how the dog is responding and what behaviors are being rewarded. Whenever you play with your dog you should be refining your ability to read the dog’s intentions. This will help you build dog body language awareness.

The How to play with your dog series will continue with suggest Games for dogs

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