Hello, my 11 month old puppy is behaving a lot and I don’t know what to do. She snaps at my face, mouths my arms and hands, takes hats from the basket and chews furniture for attention and as soon as we are on the way back from a walk she stops listening and doesn’t want to move. Does anyone have any tips to solve these problems?
There are lots of old posts on here that are similar. Labs do tend to go through an extra bouncy adolescent phase where most things they have learnt seem to go out of the window. Most of the behaviour is over excitement and does settle with patience. What have you tried so far? How much exercise does she get and how much training does she have ? Have you taught her to settle ? What worked for us at that age was plenty of off lead walks, daily training exercises to wear out her mind, and getting her to settle. We also went to weekly obedience classes which were hard but brilliant in developing good manners.
Thanks for your reply. We are keeping her in at the moment as she is in heat. She was doing this even before her heat even though she walked about 2 hours a day with playing and training in between. We have tried ignoring her which gets her to stop in the moment, but she continues to bite later on. We have also taught her to nose and paw, but she mostly paws and bites at the same time. Sometimes in the evening she starts biting her bed so we leave the room and she settles. She mostly settles when we are not in the same room as her. We have also taught her to go on her mat. We would take her out more often, but the problem is that when we are on our way back home she just sits down and refuses to move. We attended classes when she was younger, but we weren’t enjoying them as she wanted to play with the other dogs instead and took her frustration out on us by jumping and biting.
Our 11 month is like that at times. His behavior changed the last month or so and he is more challenging. I feel you can over walk and they get tired so I try to do fetch games to tire and sniffing walks where I let him sniff every tree he wants etc and it seems to tire him out more than running or walking further. He sometimes will just turn and start biting the leash and me for reasons I can't fathom. I wont move, use a harness where I can grab handle on back and sometimes have to restrain him a bit while giving command to stop or "down". I've seen videos on giving treats then but I don't want to reward bad behavior. That is the only behavior I feel at a loss with. It's hard to be in control when they are larger dogs and I want to get good advice also on responding to that. We have a pen instead of a crate and sometimes we just need a timeout for few minutes and he is better when comes out. Sometimes I find he falls asleep and is just tired. My guy never learned to calm himself as well as other dogs and gets like a toddler when tired. (biting,not listening,hyper) I am working on "place" now because he knows "stay" but maybe having a place other than pen to stay while we eat nearby will help. I don't think it will be a quick learn but I'll keep plugging. My pup also always loved wood and although new to me (past pups didn't) I don't think he will outgrow it so I just keep him away from it when I'm not home (one reason I got pen vs crate) I have marks on too many legs and drawers and don't want to encourage it by not seeing him doing it when alone. I hope it ebbs with age but no chew except bully sticks replaces the satisfaction from wood. I am hoping as some have said in other posts, age will help and once out of "teens" he'll be more consistent. I think being consistent with responses will help too.
