New puppy... need advice
 

Summer is our new bichon yorkie. She is 12wks old very happy and adjusting well to her new home. We have her crate trained and sleeping through the night. She is pretty much trained to toilet outside ( with the rare but occasional accident when we get busy and forget to watch for the signals)

I have a few questions regarding her behavior with us and our older dog.

She is in the teething stage and really likes to chew on fingers, toes, ears etc... how do we curb this behavior. We remove her and give her a toy when she does this.. but she just runs back and does it all over again. She gets really worked up and uncontrollable sometimes. she will growl and her ears go back and its seems hard to figure out if she is just playing or if she is displaying dominance behavior.(do they do try to become dominate so young?)

The other issue is with our older dog. Hux is a 9yr old Norwegian Elkhound. He has hip problems and prefers to spend most all of his day just laying around sleeping. Summer would prefer to play and pounce on him LOL . Hux is very tolerant of this behavior but after about 20 or 30 min of it he becomes irritated. He will bark at her to ward her off but sometimes, most of the time, she ignores it and continues to jump on him and grab onto his fluffy tail. Hux has never shown any signs of being aggressive towards her, this is not my concern. My concern is that Summer isn't getting the message that her behavior is unwanted and unacceptable. Any advice would be really appreciated!

Thanks

I feel as if you are describing Scout, my 11 week old Yorkie!! LOL. She does exactly the same thing. I also have an 11 year old male Yorkie and she will do the same things to him. she will all of a sudden actually charge at him! Luckily he has been very patient with her and like you, I am not concerned at all with him being aggressive to her. She just doesn't get it! I do believe that they are too young at this point to figure it out and are doing all this in a playful, puppy way. Puppies have absolutely no manners!! LOL

so just be assured that you are not alone and I would say this is normal puppy behavior and hopefully they will outgrow it sooner than later!

Good luck.

I'd suggest correcting her behavior when you see it (includes biting and bothering your older dog). Some ways: say no or ahah. If puppy doesn't listen, say the statement again and put in time out. Or, our dog trainer suggested, spray some bitter apple on his snout. Or dog whistle or anything else. Try things out and do what works and be consistent.

Good luck!

Yes. I feel like you are describing Max when he was that age as well. Here is an old thread you may want to check out. http://www.yorkietalk.com/forums/gen...ever-stop.html

You may just have to try different methods until you find one that works. Max is almost a year old and he doesn't really do it anymore to me but my husband still sticks his fingers in his mouth with reinforces the behavior. They definitely grow out of it but you will have to do some training. :)