I live in the city where people leave tons of trash on the ground. When we go for walks, my 14 week old pup wants to put everything in his mouth. We have gotten into the habit of removing the item from his mouth but tonight he bit me hard when I was removing a stick from him. He picks up rocks and mulch frequently (along as trash on the ground) and I fear he will swallow them. But now I read an article to never remove anything from your dogs mouth. What is the best avenue? Should I keep removing anything? Or just the trash? Or nothing at all?
Hello and welcome to the forum! Puppies love to explore the world with their mouths, that's very natural and a common puppy phase. But as you're discovering, the problem with regularly taking things out of a puppy's mouth is that they learn to try harder to keep hold of them. Either by running off, swallowing whatever they've found, or trying to frighten you off. The trick is to carry something with you which they would rather have in their mouth. For example their favorite treat, or an irresistible tug toy. Since they can't have everything in their mouth at once, you can use these to distract them into spitting the wrong stuff out. And at 14 weeks old, don't worry, you've still got plenty of time to replace bad habits with better ones Good luck, and do let us know how you get on!
Teaching a puppy the 'Drop' cue, is one of the most important cues you can teach - it's right up there with the recall. Your goal is to teach the puppy to WANT to let go of items he has picked up. You definitely don't want to be removing things from his mouth against his will, frequently. Doing that leads to resource guarding, keep-away, and even dogs swallowing items so they can 'have' them and stop you getting them... You need to follow a systematic training programme to train an effective Drop cue:
