Hey everybody. Welcome to Shape by Dog. I am Susan Garrett. And today, if you own a puppy,

you're going to love this episode. But if you don't own a puppy, do not turn away because there's a lot

of great dog training understanding to be gleaned by studying puppies. And I'm going to let you

know how you might be part of the reason why your friend's puppy bites. Yeah, true story.

Stick with me on this one. Today I'm going to share with you the

protocol that I have used that has worked for me over the last 30 years on helping my puppies

understand that biting a human is inappropriate communication. We're going to talk about first,

though, why it is necessary for puppies to bite. Don't be bent out of shape that your puppy bites. Actually,

let's just take a moment and celebrate. Raise the roof. Your puppy is biting. That is an

incredibly good thing. Yes, you heard me right. It's a really, really good thing.

Puppies need to bite to understand how to bite. You're going to say, well, I don't

want my dog to know how to bite. Yeah, here's the thing. Imagine you're out on a third floor

balcony in the guardrail breaks and you're about to fall. What do you do? You instantly grab,

right? You have hands that can grab. Dogs don't have opposable thumbs. They can't grab.

The only thing they can do to react is to use their mouth. That's the only thing that they have

that they can actually grasp something with. And so if they're going to use the mouth at a moment

of stress, we want it to be what's called inhibited bite. And so what we want to teach

them is what is referred to as an acquired inhibited bite. And I'm going to share with you today

how you can teach your puppy just that. And I will tell you that my knowledge of how puppies

actually shape other puppies to bite. Go back to episode five on

shaped by dogs where I talk about how dogs actually shape. Now, they don't, you know, get out

a clicker and think, oh, I'm going to watch what they're doing. Their behavior just shapes an

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