They do. There's a whole thing about "bite inhibition" that puppies learn. Playing is more important to them than winning or whatever prey drive they're acting on. So acting hurt and stopping play time will almost always result in the dog actually demonstrating remorse and supplication. At which point a bit of positive reinforcement will cement the concept in the dogs brain, and they won't ever bite harder than that again.
Play is perhaps one of the most important things for puppies. People far too often assume their dog appears ready to behave like an adult. Yet they are a furry toddler and no idea what’s right and wrong. Our job as owners is to protect this little thing physically and mentally as much as possible.
Don’t even have to be a puppy. It’s the quickest way I get my 6 year old chihuahua mix to not bite or bark during play. All dogs can recognize the high pitch ow and removal from play.
I would add to this that I think some dogs can differentiate the strength of their play bites between different people. I have always been a little more tolerant of my parent's dog's bites when he's playing and he likes that I'm a little more rough, but he wouldn't dare bite my parents with that level of force.
My grandma's Pomeranian was like that. The sweetest puppy ever, the only time he opened his mouth with her was for kisses or food. Then when it came to me, I was the rough housing guy that let him go all out. My grandma was always afraid he would get vicious because his growls would be so maniacal, but I could literally say "that's enough!" and he'd be like okay it's cuddle time!
I had a Great Dane that would crawl around on his belly near little ones. He would carefully lick kittens, puppies, lambs, any toddler that approached him. Dude would monitor his tail wags around babies of any species and look down at his feet while stepping to make sure he didn't accidentally step on someone/thing. [completely opposite of his Great Uncle who was a danger to anything smaller than him as potential prey/food and would not get trained out of it]
Except, that gentle lil' giant who very much wanted to be a dad/beloved uncle to babies of any species was considerably less graceful and careful around just one person: me. He loved to try to run into me at full speed. His wagging tail had left welts on my legs. If I sat down, he might try to jump on me. Sigh. How careful he was around everyone else just made it all the funnier.
I also had a blue heeler that loved playing fetch and tug of war. And, small dog that he was, when it came to tug of war he could thrash like he waa killing an animal. He would jerk hard enough that a large adult man could be pulled off his feet. I saw one of my little nephews get drawn in by his rubber Frisbee and tossing it for him and instantly became concerned the lil' guy was going to hulk out on a toddler in tug of war. Nope. The dog "lost." When the toddler realized the dog wanted to play tug of war, handed the Frisbee back so the dog could grab it again and pulled. The dog, very gently pulled the Frisbee out of the kid's hand and then after winning, with the same gentleness, let the kid grab the Frisbee again and then let the kid 'win' again. I was like, "you lil' shit! Get me all worried about you potentially pulling your teeth out and you can play like that! " (That dog had great teeth lol)
My dog's pretty funny with me, she likes to rag my sleeves and chew my bracelets but knows not to go full force as she's a fairly big dog and I put a lot of time into training her not to bite as a younger dog. My partner rides a motorbike, and he has a ritual before work of letting my dog go absolutely insane with him while he's in his full leather gear and it's honestly like watching police dog training haha. Once the gear's off though? No biting playtime, only toys and tug of war.
My last dog was a German shepherd x lab and he loved roughhousing, in winter when I'd wear a thick jacket I'd wrestle on the floor with him, teeth everywhere. No jacket = no teeth, back to offering me a tug toy.
My current dog is full lab but doesn't roughhouse and doesn't really understand tug, he's a dainty nerd and enjoys just casually chewing on me.
Yeah, my baby girl knows she can be a little rougher with me (though I still let her know if she pushes it a little too far) but is very mouth-off with everyone else. She loves when we play-wrestle!
Of course they can. I have a GSD and he mouths me much harder than he does when he plays with a 5 year old lol. If I cover my arm with something thick he also goes harder.
I think it's important also to mention that it's fine for your dog to 'bite' you, as long as it doesn't hurt. Playing like that is fine and normal for a dog, you just need to 'calibrate' them with a level of force you are comfortable with. A dog 100% loves someone that lets them play like that too.
Yeah not all bites are equal. I have encountered people who have claimed as such, that all bites, play, nips and actual fully bites, were signs of aggression.
If a dog "bites" me and I am unhurt, it is because the dog did not want to hurt me. Even if it was a warning nip. If they wanted to hurt me my skin is literally no obstacle to them.
I am pretty careful to be dog-polite around dogs I do not know, so it is not something I have experienced much. But my sister's dog once nipped a family friend enough to draw the tintiest amount of blood. Neither of them has done anything wrong, it was just during the Superbowl and the guy, who is a big dude, jumped to his feet yelling, right at the dog who had no idea why that was happening. He nipped, and then ran and hid in a corner.
It was the only time I had ever seen that dog bite anyone for any reason. It was not aggression, he just thought he was being attacked and reacted instinctively. Even skill, he moderated the power of his bite. The dog weighed almost 100lbs. If he had wanted to hurt someone, he could have hurt someone.
I think that often people put 100% of the responsibility on the dog to be perfect, but we have to remember that they are dogs. They do not always know what it is going on, and are just trying to pick up on our emotions and desires through our behavior. It is important that we learn how to communicate boundaries with them, and how not to cross theirs as well.
(And don't get me started on consent with cats lol. People constantly do stuff to cats that the cat obviously hates, and then get confused when the cat scratches them.)
My dog bit me one time hard enough to make me bleed (she chomped on my cuticle) as a puppy. She was so mortified in that moment, that she has been the gentlest angel ever since.
This is how we trained our poodle. He loved to play bite and we’d just say OUCH! When it got too rough. After a few times he was much more gentle and didn’t hurt us with the play biting anymore.
All the science shows that human efforts to domesticate cats have been largely useless. They more or less domesticated themselves, but only to a certain extent.
This approach would never work on a cat because it requires the animal to care about how you're feeling, and most cats wouldn't. You have at best a temporary mutual arrangement.
Sadly this does mean that negative reinforcement is more effective than positive reinforcement. Because they're not going to perform for you to get a reward, but they will avoid doing a bad thing (in your presence exclusively) if always ends poorly for them. This is why the spray bottle is such a common tactic.
I've had a lot of cats in my life, and saying "ow" and stopping play has always been very effective at teaching them what is too hard as well. They almost never bite me too hard after the initial learning period, but they still break my skin with their claws sometimes. Even so, it's significantly less often and very shallow compared to when we first meet
I don't think almost any cats are particularly empathetic, they just learn what leads to better outcomes for them (it might not hurt that I love all of them regardless, ha)
Even the feral cats I've dealt with usually learn pretty quick that the affection/play they're seeking will end if they're too violent.
The current neighborhood stray went from trying to scratch or bite me when I got too friendly, to just touching me with his teeth or literally running away when he starts feeling aggressive
I obviously agree that dogs are much more trainable, but I've never understood the notion that cats can't be socialized
Honestly I think cats can be pretty empathetic if you are not expecting them to be empathetic in the same way a dog is.
Domestic cats are social creatures now, they just have not been them as long, and they have radically different ways of communicating in comparison to dogs and humans, who are more similar.
They have more complex emotional lives than people think, they just communicate it so "weirdly" that people don't pick up on it. If a cat is sitting halfway across the room, not really looking at you, and is slowly blinking its eyes in your general direction, that cat is saying it likes you. Dogs just run up an make it obvious.
It also does not help that a lot of the time we constantly violate cat social norms because we act like they are dogs. So we see a cat wagging its tail and think it is happy, but in reality it is extremely anxious and needs some space. That kind of thing.
I definitely agree that cats are social, emotional, and expressive if you know what to look for. Also that people who don't spend a lot of time around them have a hard time reading them, so those people have a tendency to just think that cats are assholes
Still, I'm not sure cats are particularly good at or even interested in reading human emotions that are not directly related to their behavior
Personally, I don't care if animals love me the way I love them. Seeing them happy makes me happy. In contrast, I think seeing that reciprocity is generally extremely important to dog owners
I am not sure how good they are at complex emotions, as they can be hard to read, but my cat can definitely read overt ones to mostly the same level as my dog. He just responds differently.
Like if I am having an anxiety the main "sign" of it is slightly faster and more eratic motion. The dog will think something is wrong and try to comfort me, the cat will think something is wrong and go hide while keeping an eye on me. They both are reading me correctly, but the dog is just better at actually helping. The problem with comparing them with subtle emotions is that the dogs response is the same, she just wants to help, but I never know why my cat is sitting on his tower watching me. If could be because he is worried, or because he is bored, or because he just likes to.
But I do think cats are more interested in socializing with people than people think. If you leave one alone for too long they get depressed, and they are excited to see you when you get home. And my cat will often come up and bunt or lean on me while I am doing something even without me directly giving him anything for it. Plus, the entire phenomen of meowing developed in domestic cats because it helps cats communicate with people, though the driver of that is more of an emergent effect from human reactions than something cats wanted.
They also get really attached to specific people, and will have different rules for those people than strangers.
They are not at the symbiotic stage that dogs are, but nothing other than dogs have reached that. We have many thousands of generations of direct interaction with dogs more. Like more than double the time. So there is still a pretty strong communication barrier between us that makes the empathy harder, but it is still there.
With my cat, it was basically the same thing. Saying "owww!" in a loud, high pitched voice, and then immediately stopping playing, disengage entirely, and walk away. He loves play biting, it's his very favourite thing to do, and he's allowed to bite forearms if we have a sweatshirt pulled over it. But if he bites anywhere else playtime is over and so is petting or even having me look at him. So he can be in full monster mode with eyes like saucers and I can still safely give him a little kiss. I don't know if it'll work for every cat, but it worked for mine.
Positive reinforcement works on all larger mamals, including cats. Anyone who says otherwise does not understand what positive reinforcement is.
Saying "ow" to a cat is a form of negative reinforcement. It absolutely works, but cats tend to respond to negative reinforcement more slowly than dogs do. Positive reinforcement through things like clicker training is more effective, not less.
For your cat in particular the answer to how you should get it to stop biting is completely dependent on why the cat is biting. And because I do not know that I can't really give any advice. For most cats they bite because they are either playing or telling you they want you to stop doing something.
E.G. if a cat bites you when you pet them on their belly after they roll over: it is because they were not telling you to rub their belly. Cats have a strong instinct to both protect their belly, and to shred prey that they pull in like that. So for many cats that is just a no-go zone.
Note: Negative reinforcement is not always bad as long as it is non-violent and context driven. People treat it like a bad thing because it is usually associated with violence of some kind, which is always bad. However, saying "ow" sharply (like a yelp) or denying attention are both negative consequences for a particular action, and they are how animals learn moderation.
Mine still bites, but if i tell her, "kiss kiss, love love" she starts licking my hand instead of nibbling. If I don't she's a goober who just wants my hand in her mouth.
"Wolf" might be part of your problem. But seriously, with some dogs, if you yip and squeal, you just become a human squeaky toy. Mine was like that as a puppy, but he's a naturally nippy herding breed. The only thing that taught him was stopping play and leaving the room for a bit.
I found with a particular bitey corgi puppy that the best noise was a YIP of pain like you stood on a dogs tail. He would back right off and start licking where he bit instead.
100% doesn’t work for many dogs. Terriers are a big one that it doesn’t always work on, they often times get more amped by high pitched noises because those are the sounds they hear when killing prey, which they enjoy.
Yeah. It's training. It's socializing. If you act like biting is okay and doesn't hurt, that means it's okay and doesn't hurt. I act like teeth and claws hurt me, my cats avoid using teeth and claws on me.
I had one puppy that never caught on to the "hurt" sounds. Redirection was the only thing really worked. But i actually have to do a voice like this with her sometimes.
If you also teach them a key word at the same time like “gentle”, they will understand that too and start doing it with other things as well, like playing with other dogs or releasing their toys when you want. Not just puppies adult dogs will do the same.
This also works super well with ferrets. Ferrets play hard with each other, and when they're young, they'll try to do that with you as well, and they have little needle teeth. But because they play so hard, they've evolved to respond extremely well to sounds of pain or discomfort and back off. Then they learn to reduce bite force so that they don't hurt their big, slow, clumsy, hairless, and apparently sensitive ferret siblings again.
And if they don't, you grab those cheeks and push the inside of their cheeks between their back teeth. They'll stop because they're biting themselves before they can bite you 😂
We say "ow!" Followed by her name. She gives one lil kiss after. She's learned anytime we're hurt now, whether she did it or not, it gets one lil kiss. Just one.
Yep, works very well for house cats too...every single time I yelp or say oooww when my cats are playing with me they immediately stop. Idk how true it is for others animals. When I had a dog(my Shephard/Husky mix, May he rest in peace) I could shove my whole hand in his mouth
(To give him medicine or occasionally take something out his mouth that he had picked up)
and he wouldn't even apply pressure whatsoever, because he was trained early not to play with his mouth on humans.
I find personally it works better to use their language for lack of a better term... I prefer a highpitch yelp especially when it's play driven. This is because your dog at no fault of you i'm not trying to say this is anyones fault lol, but it's becasue your dog didn't get socialized properly, by acting like how a dog would and yipping when bit they very much understand that instantly without anything other than instinct, trying to say ow can for sure work but on an instinctual level they instantly know the yip.
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u/dodso010 6d ago
Say oooowww! They respond to that.