Last updated: September 16, 2025 | Originally published: June 18, 2022
You knew puppies bite. Everyone warns you about teething and play-biting.
But then your puppy started biting hard. Lunging at your arms, your clothes, even your face. Leaving you covered in scratches and bruises.
And now you’re thinking:
- This feels a lot more intense than I expected.
- Maybe I’m doing something wrong.
- Maybe this puppy isn’t the right fit for me.
If you’ve had those thoughts, you’re not alone. We hear this all the time.
Today’s post is a case study of one of the most extreme cases of puppy biting we’ve seen.
Meet Vinny, the World’s Bitiest Puppy (as he’s affectionately known around here)
Back in 2022, Kathryn joined our online training school because she couldn’t get her 15-week-old rescue puppy, Vinny, to stop biting.
Every time someone touched him, he’d bite. They couldn’t even pet him without getting chomped.
And while this wasn’t true aggression, it also wasn’t always play biting. Vinny was really frustrated and would basically throw a tantrum every time someone touched him for any reason.
Before he was adopted, Vinny had lived in a foster home with young kids who played roughly and carried him around constantly. By the time Kathryn brought him home, he was done with people grabbing him.
How it started
We first met this dynamic duo at one of the live Q&A sessions we hold for our students. Here’s the clip of that full segment.
Prefer to read/skim? Here’s the transcript
Kathryn’s question: How do I get my puppy to accept handling without biting?
I have a 15 week old rescue (Aussiedoodle mix) who is quite challenging. Very smart and trainable, very excitable (loves people and dogs almost too much). His first weeks were spent in a foster home with 2 small children who played very roughly with him (think running, screaming, hair pulling, biting … exactly the way puppies play). I know this because I saw them in action twice.
The four year old told me twice that “he bites.”
Sure enough, he’s a land shark. We are working away at that (your lessons on biting have been helpful), but an extra twist is that if I try to touch him or pick him up without first offering a treat, he will bite my hands. I have been using his breakfast and lunch meals to pet him gently all over his body in exchange for a piece of food. This works very well when I have food. Once it’s gone, he is sensitive again about being touched.
[…] Any other suggestions regarding the handling? I was ready to rehome him Wednesday (not really, but in my mind I sure was). With no snuggling or cuddling for the 7 weeks we’ve had him, I feel pretty low. I am also experiencing the WTFWIT phase during this time. Your videos have been a life saver. Thanks!
Our response
The condensed version, edited for a quick read that still conveys the important bits:
Jake: This puppy was in a household with children who were very rough with him. I think he’s never had any say in whether he’s handled – and that would drive anyone a little crazy.
So give it time. You’ve had him for seven weeks, which feels like forever with a new puppy, but it’s not very long in the grand scheme of things.
You’re still in the thick of it. He still needs to settle in and learn to trust you.
So go at his pace. Let him have some choice about whether you pet him. I know it’s hard not to cuddle a puppy, but if you respect it when he says “no,” he’ll get much more comfortable with touch over time.
Erin: Yeah, I know it’s really hard to not cuddle him and you’re not getting any reward for the time you’re putting in. Watching him grow up while not getting that affection back can make it feel like the window is closing – and that pressure can make you want to rush.
But when we rush puppies, we can do more damage and set our progress back.
I do think Vinny has learned that when people touch him, he has no control over what happens next.
He’s expressing his frustration the way puppies express ALL their feelings: with their teeth.
One helpful step here is to teach him a Hand Touch cue. That does a few things:
- It gives him mental exercise
- It’s a practical skill for later, especially since breeds like aussiedoodles can be reactive or sensitive
- And most importantly, it teaches him that hands don’t always mean being grabbed.
Jake: There is a lesson on [hand touch] in the Baby Obedience course in Puppy Survival School.
Erin: And keep in mind that this puppy is only 15 weeks old. Half his life has been spent with you, but the other half was spent being manhandled by kids who had no concept of boundaries or consent. So I know it feels like you’ve been working on this forever, but from his perspective, it’s still early days.
So give it more time. He’s learning. He’s a baby.
The other thing to think about: His foster home experience may have taught him that rough play is how he’s supposed to interact with humans. So when your hand comes toward him, you might mean it as a gentle pat, but he sees it as an opportunity for a game.
So make sure you also incorporate lots of toys into your play. So that we can start getting him excited about playing with something other than human skin.
To summarize for you, Kathryn:
1: Patience. He’s an itty bitty baby and this is representative of like half his life. So be super patient.
2: Self care for you. Because this is a time where you’re doing a lot of work and getting absolutely no reward from this puppy, which I totally get. That’s not his fault, but you have to give yourself reward from somewhere else. Please do some self care stuff for you, so that you can be in a really good place to have a good relationship with this pup.
3: Actionable step, teach a touch cue.
4: Incorporate lots and lots and lots of toys into your play, so you can start breaking that association of “I play with human hands,” and making it “I play with toys.”
How it went: the training process
Kathryn quickly started implementing our initial advice. On the member forums, she writes:
I’ve been working on the hand touching exercise, and he’s caught on to that quickly. I’ve already used it a few times when I can tell by his energy that his teeth are tingling for contact with skin. It worked well.
I think that you’re right, Erin, that Vinny’s issues around handling are a combination of frustration (lack of control/choice over being touched) and having learned from the kids that play biting is how puppies and humans interact. It’s often quite clear that he thinks that biting is all part of the game. I’m also taking your comments about self care to heart, and relaxing a bit. Things will happen in their time.
The next step: reducing how much Vinny needed to bite in the first place
We helped Kathryn put together a plan to meet Vinny’s needs for exercise, play, rest, and enrichment so that he’d be less cranky. And most importantly, we taught her how to structure all of that activity in a way that actually calmed him down instead of making him more hyper.
Kathryn learned to read Vinny’s signals and ask: What does he need right now? Often the biting was really about fatigue, overstimulation, or needing a break.
“When he was wound up and bitey, I’d stop and ask myself: does he need to go out? More exercise? Less exercise? A nap? Once I figured out the source of his frustration — and there usually was one — life got easier.”
This was a turning point:
“I stopped beating myself up about not doing everything perfectly, worked my way through the lessons, stuck as closely as possible to a schedule that included regular naps for Vinny, and made more time for us humans. Getting an X-pen and putting him in it when I was overtired and stressed was a game changer for us.”
Teaching the puppy how to interact without using his teeth
Kathryn implemented all of our core “puppy taming” exercises to give Vinny better ways to interact and ask for what he wanted. She also worked on trust and handling.
“Every morning, I’d sit on the floor in the X-pen with high value treats. Vinny got a treat for each gentle touch. At first, once the food was gone, the biting started again. Over time, though, he let me leave my hand on him a bit longer. Then I started to touch his toes/nails. Eventually he gave us signs that he enjoyed being touched. That was a joyful day.”
That’s not something you figure out on day one. Kathryn learned how to go at Vinny’s pace because she had a place to check in, describe what was happening, and get feedback on what to do next.
Handling the bitey moments
We also gave her some practical tools for what to do in the moment when Vinny would bite.
And yes, some of those practical tools involve methods I’m sure you’ve heard about, like using toys, or redirection, or even walking away and ignoring them.
But there are two keys to success that everyone misses:
One, knowing which technique is appropriate to use when. Like, sometimes walking away and creating space is the answer, and sometimes that’s the worst thing to do. The right answer will be highly context-dependent. So that’s why, like Kathryn did, you can come to our forums and live Zoom sessions and let us tell you exactly what to do.
And two, teaching your puppy the skills they need to stop biting. If you wait until it’s 6pm and your pup is in an out-of-control bitey mood and then wave a toy at them or tell them to sit… it’s not going to work.
You gotta teach them the skills that will make them capable of playing with toys or following commands when they’re in a crazy bitey mood.
Over time, the biting calmed down
Vinny began to not just accept cuddling and affection, but actively sought it out!
“Vinny has great bite inhibition now,” Kathryn wrote when he was 18 months old. “He rarely even puts his teeth on me intentionally. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re really good. He’s sweet, exuberant, full of fun and curiosity.”
How it’s going: from land shark to best friend
“At times I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we did get there. Calmer days do come. You do get your life back. Puppyhood feels interminable when you’re in it, but in the grand scheme, it’s short. Things really do get better.”
Now, Vinny is a respectable young adult. Kathryn did an amazing job with him. And she’s been kind enough to help out other puppy parents in our community, offering encouragement and advice based on her experiences.
“[The Academy] came into my life at one of the most challenging times I’ve experienced and I believe that the courses and the guidance, support and reassurance you gave me were, in large part, responsible for my getting through it (and Vinny too!). And for that I am deeply grateful.
I also really appreciated the community I found with other Academy members who were going through similar experiences – it was heartening to know I was not alone in my puppyhood trials. : )”
What can you learn from this?
Puppy biting isn’t always teething or play
Especially when it’s this extreme, it’s a sign of frustration, confusion, or exhaustion (or a history of all three, like in Vinny’s case). It’s not aggression; more like a tantrum.
Handling can be taught (and even enjoyed).
With trust-building and the right approach, a puppy who once hated being touched can learn to appreciate it.
There’s no one single training exercise that will resolve this.
For these extra bitey babies, we have to change things across multiple areas of their life. Which is easier than it sounds, but it’s not as simple as “do this one weird trick to stop puppy biting instantly!”
It’s not the tool, it’s how (and when) you use it.
All the tactics you’ve tried and had no luck with (redirection, toys, ignoring them, etc) CAN still work, but only when you know which one to use in a given moment.
Without the right combination of exercise, enrichment, and rest, ANY training tactic will just add fuel to the fire.
Puppies who are overtired or understimulated bite the hardest. Meeting needs comes before training.
This would be a lot easier if you had a team on your side
Puppy biting feels unmanageable because you’re not a professional trainer (and that’s okay!) Kathryn didn’t muscle through this on her own.
What turned things around for her was simple: It was having a plan, knowing which steps to take when, and being able to get answers to her specific questions about her specific puppy.
That’s exactly what we do inside the Academy. The courses give you the structure, and the Q&As and forums give you the personalized support Kathryn used to get from “hopeless” to “happy.”
If you’re ready for your own calmer days (and fewer tooth marks), come join us in the Academy.
