Won't Stop Licking...
 

Does anyone know how to break the habit of licking? When I am holding or petting Paco he licks my hand, my face, my leg, anything that's near his mouth. He walks up and licks any skin available on anyone. Any suggestions? He's 5 months old, BTW.

I don't know how to stop it. My Cali licks the bedspread, carpet obsessively too. She has allergies and is 3 years old and I thought maybe it had to do with her allergies.

My baby does the same thing...she loves to lick my husband's face and chew on his beard. She also licks her paws alot, I think its allergies. I am currently changing her dog food to Natural Choice. We were feeding her Royal Canin.

Conner is 2 1/2 years old. He still licks my husband's legs.:rolleyes::rolleyes:

Licking
 

That stinks because it drives my husband crazy. Paco also waits by the bathtub so if he gets a chance, he can lick the soap on my legs. It was cute at first, now it's annoying as you know what.

Has anyone tried bitter apple? I used that years ago for a hound that kept chewing my deck stairs and it worked great.

Alfie is 15 months and constantly licks us. It does get annoying especially when you have put false tan on and he is trying to lick it off. :D

licking
 

It is really funny that everyone has this. At our house we say no more kisses and she seems to quit. But the bedspread, carpet and other nonhuman things she licks forever. I finally have to say enough Mia and she will quit. But I have noticed lately she really licks our lab Rocky a lot also. I think it is cute but I can tell that it is a habit I need to control now. It is like watching a mother monkey bathing her baby, and he does the same to her. It is cute.

licking? learn to live with it...
 

Our first yorkie would lick incessantly. We were never able to completely control it. He would listen to us for a while if he told him "No!", but that only works for so long. Soon he'd be back at it. After a bath, after the Gym (his favorite - yes, it was gross, but that's the way it was), at night when the humans are too sleepy to stop it...

I have heard about the allergy theory or the salt theory (which I find more plausible), but unless you want to bathe in bitter apple, get used to it and do the best you can.:aimeeyork

My Husband doesnt like them licking him in the face so he pulls his face away and they have learned not to lick him. I let them lick me because I think its their way of showing affection

Trixie does not lick, but plays , and pull hair

Everytime Katy licks my chin (her favorite spot) I tell her nice "kisses". Believe me it is much better than her nipping at us which is slowly getting better. She is good about licking when she wants her way - she sucks up to us. LOL Also, she has always licked our leather couch since we've had her. Don't know why.

Well, at least I'm not alone...lol. Thanks for the input!

as well as licking do yours nibble your hair ?? u know with their front teeth ?? kinnys "treats" me to a brush up sometimes.

Ours just licks for kisses and sometimes we have to tell Zoie that is enough. But none of them lick anything else, like the floor or chairs or anything like that. Zoie will love licking off the water after you take a bath from your legs.

Licking is used to appease the person that they are licking. It is to tell you to calm down or that they are stressing.
So to get them to stop no yelling no pushing no scolding or more will happen. put it on a cue kiss or ignore it and it will slow and stop.

JL

OK, but there are other reasons they lick as well...
 

This is one reason: a submissive dog licks those higher up in the pack, and its usually on the mouth. My yorkies love to get me in the face with the behavior, and the little pup will do this to his older sister; the sister does this to her bigger doggy pals we see in the neighborhood. But there is also the constant licking that I doubt is because of this. Instead, I think its a compulsive behavior or because they just plain like the taste. Our first yorkie demonstrated this behavior... he liked whatever exposed flesh he could get at; and would carry on with this for maybe 30 minutes before he got tired of it:aimeeyork. Our current dogs don't do anything like that.

My shih poo is a licker. At this very moment he is licking my legs. Exposed flesh is fair game. I used to let him lick my neck before he'd go to sleep at nite. It seemed to calm him and then he'd go right to sleep. But I decided it was a little creepy so I stopped him. He also lick the crease of his back legs. He has the little hair there all knotted up. He's kind of a nervous dog so I guess thats it. He also loves to lick Otis's ears.

Sam is a toe licker


And when is he is snugglin he will lick you a couple times then go to sleep.

Ok appeasement behavior is not got anything to do with submissive dogs and or dominate ones. It is actually more likely a dominate dog will do it to show a sud one that all is well.( If we must use those archaic terms at all. As dog will change from sudmissive to dominate depending on the day, time, mood or what ever they are feeling and are not stagnet one or the other ever.)

appeasement behavior is what one dog any dog does to another and it is to stop a fight or an action or to slow down a concern. Then it builds into attention getting behavior.. yippee does mother like it or not what ever the attention type either bad or good and we are off to the races in licking.
It becomes a habit for attention getting and man does it work well.
Actual OCDs are rare and is not something one tosses around like candy.
It is a mental health concern tided up in a great big deal of anxiety disorders and all leading to the need for a dog to be on a strong drugs.
Oh so you know I do live with a yorkie that has diagnosed OCDs and it not pretty so I know that which I am talking about from a professional level as well as a mother level.

If you ignore it it will go away if it OCDs it should only occurs when stressed or bored as a way to calm oneself not another.
Most licking other then self mutilation is attention seeking behavior. What do you do for attention seeking you ignore it, redirect or change it it just a behavior.

JL

lol my baby kona always tries to lick my self tanner off too (=

Paco is definitely a hair chewer. He also gets mad when I get dressed. It's very difficult to get my other leg in my jeans when I'm playing tug-o-war with a 6lb ball of muscle.:D

OMG!!! My Phoebe does this, and when I say "no licking", she licks the air. It's really weird. Her tongue looks really big too. So now I just let her lick away, and it stops a lot quicker. This is wierd... she will only start licking when she sees me and only me. With other people she doesn't get the urge to lick.

According to Stacy at

Body Language in Dogs: how to read what your dog is saying, from Stacy's Wag'N'Train

"Submissive body postures include: lowered head and body; allowing other dogs to stand over them or hook their heads over their shoulders; licking at other dogs' lips and mouth corners; looking away from the other dog; rolling on back and craning head away from other dog, while covering tucking their tail."

Although, often times these explanations are simplified, and I don't doubt that for some dogs, the one that is usually dominant might lick a submissive one to give it confidence. With my dogs, this only goes one way!:aimeeyork

As far as the compulsive behaviors goes, I found this site most helpful:
Compulsive Behavior in Dogs

A clear definition of "compulsive behavior" (vs. a dog that just licks way too much, for example) is not provided, but requires professional evaluation. My sister in law's mixed breed lab has terrible anxiety and licks itself so much that its paws bleed, which has to be considered "compulsive", but I would imagine that the definition of "compulsive behavior" is somewhat subjective.

She is using out dated terms for you all to understand but submissive and dominate in dog training is considered inaccurate as it does not describe the action but the reaction of you the person watching.

It clouds what is really going on which is rude behavior or behavior to stop an action.

Dogs are not dominate nor submissive it just behavior and should be treated as such.
Want good work on dog speak try .. Brenda Aloffs book or work done by Truid Rugrass or Pat McConnells book other end of the leash.
Dogs do not work in a hierarchy which is dominate or submissive they are not chickens which do and are the base of all hierarchy stuff.

Dogs live as social beings and therefore the structure is not set in stone but in flux all the time.
Top ten myths

http://ca.lifestyle.yahoo.com/pets/d...s/e/behaviour-
training/dogsincanada/61/fairy-tales/1

Fairy tales
Provided by: Jean Donaldson, Dogs in Canada
The Top 10 dog behaviour myths
There are a lot of myths about dog behaviour so I whittled it down to
ones that were pervasive and that made myth criteria, which are:
a) there is no (zero) scientific evidence supporting the contention;
b) there is scientific evidence against the contention and/or
scientific evidence supporting alternatives.

1) Dogs are naturally pack animals with a clear social order. This
one busts coming out of the gate as free-ranging dogs (pariahs, semi-
feral populations, dingoes, etc.) don't form packs. As someone who
spent years solemnly repeating that dogs were pack animals, it was
sobering to find out that dogs form loose, amorphous, transitory
associations with other dogs.

2) If you let dogs exit doorways ahead of you, you're letting them be
dominant. There is not only no evidence for this, there is no
evidence that the behaviour of going through a doorway has any social
significance whatsoever. In order to lend this idea any plausibility,
it would need to be ruled out that rapid doorway exit is not simply a
function of their motivation to get to whatever is on the other side
combined with their higher ambulation speed.

3) In multi-dog households, "support the hierarchy" by giving
presumed dominant animals patting, treats, etc., first, before giving
the same attention to presumed subordinate animals. There is no
evidence that this has any impact on inter-dog relations, or any type
of aggression. In fact, if one dog were roughing up another, the laws
governing Pavlovian conditioning would dictate an opposite tack:
Teach aggressive dogs that other dogs receiving scarce resources
predicts that they are about to receive some. If so practised, the
tough dog develops a happy emotional response to other dogs getting
stuff – a helpful piece of training, indeed. No valuable conditioning
effects are achieved by giving the presumed higher-ranking dog
goodies first.

4) Dogs have an innate desire to please. This concept has never been
operationally defined, let alone tested. A vast preponderance of
evidence, however, suggests that dogs, like all properly functioning
animals, are motivated by food, water, sex, and like many animals, by
play and access to bonded relationships, especially after an absence.
They're also, like all animals, motivated by fear and pain, and these
are the inevitable tools of those who eschew the use of food, play,
etc., however much they cloak their coercion and collar-tightening in
desire to please rhetoric.

5) Rewards are bribes and thus compromise relationships. Related to
4), the idea that behaviour should just, in the words of Susan
Friedman, Ph.D., "flow like a fountain" without need of consequences,
is opposed by more than 60 years of unequivocal evidence that
behaviour is, again to quote Friedman, "a tool to produce
consequences." Another problem is that bribes are given before
behaviour, and rewards are given after. And, a mountain of evidence
from decades of research in pure and applied settings has
demonstrated over and over that positive reinforcement – i.e.,
rewards – make relationships better, never worse.

6) If you pat your dog when he's afraid, you're rewarding the fear.
Fear is an emotional state – a reaction to the presence or
anticipation of something highly aversive. It is not an attempt at
manipulation. If terrorists enter a bank and order everybody down on
the floor, the people will exhibit fearful behaviour. If I then give
a bank customer on the floor a compliment, 20 bucks or chocolates, is
this going to make them more afraid of terrorists next time? It's
stunningly narcissistic to imagine that a dog's fearful behaviour is
somehow directed at us (along with his enthusiastic door-dashing).

7) Punish dogs for growling or else they'll become aggressive. Ian
Dunbar calls this "removing the ticker from the time bomb." Dogs
growl because something upsetting them is too close. If you punish
them for informing us of this, they are still upset but now not
letting us know, thus allowing scary things to get closer and
possibly end up bitten. Much better to make the dog comfortable
around what he's growling at so he's not motivated to make it go away.

8) Playing tug makes dogs aggressive. There is no evidence that this
is so. The only study ever done, by Borchelt and Goodloe, found no
correlation between playing tug and the incidence of aggression
directed at either family members or strangers. Tug is, in fact, a
cooperative behaviour directed at simulated prey: the toy.

9) If you give dogs chew toys, they'll learn to chew everything. This
is a Pandora's box type of argument that, once again, has zero
evidence to support it. Dogs are excellent discriminators and readily
learn with minimal training to distinguish their toys from forbidden
items. The argument is also logically flawed as chewing is
a `hydraulic' behaviour that waxes and wanes, depending on
satiation/deprivation, as does drinking, eating and sex. Dogs without
chew objects are like zoo animals in barren cages. Unless there is
good compensation with other enrichment activities, there is a
welfare issue here.

10) You can't modify "genetic" behaviour. All behaviour – and I mean
all – is a product of a complex interplay between genes and the
environment. And while some behaviours require less learning than
others, or no learning at all, their modifiability varies as much as
does the modifiability of behaviours that are primarily learned.
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