When do puppies stop biting? An honest answer from a behaviourist.

 So, when do puppies stop biting?

For most puppies, the constant biting eases somewhere between six and eight months, as teething finishes - the exact timing varies by breed and by the individual puppy.

But there’s no fixed date, and any article that gives you one is guessing, because teething is only part of the story.

Puppies bite because they’re tired, because a need isn’t being met, and because their mouth is how they play and explore - and none of that switches off when the adult teeth arrive.

Whether the biting fades as your puppy matures, or hangs around into adolescence, comes down to what they’re learning right now about how to play with humans. That part is yours to influence, and it’s what the rest of this article is about.

And before we go any further: puppy biting is totally, absolutely normal, especially if you have a gundog puppy or one of their crosses.

Puppies don’t have hands. Their mouth is how they explore the world and how they interact with you. Where a toddler might tug on your sleeve, a puppy uses their teeth.

And dogs bred to use their mouths to work - to pick things up and carry - are going to have things in their mouths. We can’t change that. What we can change is what they pick up and what they bite, so it isn’t your hands or your clothes.

Your puppy doesn’t mean to hurt you. They’re not out to get you, and they don’t hate you. They’re just doing what puppies do. I’ve worked with hundreds of puppies over ten years, raised puppies myself and I have the scars from puppy teeth to prove it.

The puppy bniting timeline - the surges to expect

Not every puppy has read the handbook, but the pattern I see again and again goes like this.

Biting first becomes noticeable around 9-10 weeks (it’s like 8 weeks old puppies lure you into the false sense of security), then often ramps up at around 14 to 16 weeks, when the baby teeth start to fall out.

There’s sometimes a small reprieve at around 16-ish weeks, when those needle-sharp canines go - when my youngest puppy Elphaba lost hers, I genuinely celebrated.

Then at around 20 to 22 weeks there’s often one last frantic, relentless surge as the big back teeth come through. Most puppies finish teething at around six months, some not until seven or eight - and along the way they lose 28 puppy teeth and grow 42 adult ones. That’s a lot of teething packed into a few months.

But remember: this is the teething contribution to biting, not the whole story. How much your puppy bites day to day has far more to do with sleep, needs and play habits than with what’s happening in their mouth.

Why do puppies bite?

Tiredness is the biggest one, and the most missed. Tired puppies are cranky. They’re like tired toddlers - horrendous and relentless. That frantic, non-stop, glazed-eyes biting in the evening is, more often than not, a puppy who needs to be asleep.

Puppies need far more sleep than most owners realise. Veterinary guidance puts a young puppy’s needs at around 18 hours a day. Yet in the Generation Pup study - UK research following thousands of puppies - owners reported their 16-week-old puppies sleeping only around 11 hours a day. Whether puppies genuinely aren’t getting the sleep they need or owners simply aren’t counting the naps, my money is on the first. Most pet puppies I meet are running on empty. A puppy won’t take themselves off to bed just because they’re tired - they don’t know any better - so sometimes we have to enforce those naps for them. More on that below.

Puppies also bite when their needs aren’t met. Hungry puppies bite. Thirsty puppies bite. A puppy who needs the toilet - a poo in particular - bites. They don’t know how to meet those needs themselves, so the frustration comes out through their teeth.

And underneath it all, a puppy’s nervous system is still immature. They can’t yet regulate their own arousal, so excitement and frustration spill over fast - and in a mouth-first animal, spilling over means biting.

Golden retriever puppy biting - and other gundog breeds

If you have a golden retriever, a spaniel, a Labrador, a cockapoo or any other gundog breed or cross, there’s an extra layer to all of this: your puppy comes from generations of dogs bred to use their mouths all day - to hunt, pick up and carry. Retrievers, spaniels, HPRs and every cross between them.

In my experience, that’s why gundog puppies are often noticeably more bitey than some other breeds - although not every puppy has read their breed description. For these puppies, a mouth on something isn’t misbehaviour. It’s the family trade.

And it’s exactly why we don’t try to stop these puppies using their mouths - we teach them what to put in them.

How to stop puppy biting

 

First, when your puppy is bitey, run a quick mental checklist. How long since they last napped? How close is the next meal? When did they last toilet - especially a poo? Is the water bowl empty? A surprising amount of biting stops when you fix the thing underneath it rather than the biting itself.

For play biting, I have two golden rules. We follow them religiously with every puppy we raise.

Rule one: nobody plays with the puppy without a toy in their hand. And I mean a long toy - long enough that you can animate it on the floor while standing up, so your hands, sleeves and trousers are nowhere near your little shark’s mouth.

Better still, start the game before the biting starts. If your puppy has just woken up and been to the toilet, they’ll want to play - get that toy moving before they make their own entertainment out of your ankles.

That toy doesn’t live in the toybox either. It comes out for games with humans and gets put away after, so it stays special and exciting.

Play for a couple of minutes, then wind down with something calming. Chewing, sniffing and licking are the holy trinity of calming activities, and sniffing is the easiest: grab a handful of your puppy’s kibble and sprinkle it in the grass for them to sniff out.

A tip that makes all of this easier: weigh out your puppy’s daily food allowance in the morning and put it in a tub. Those are your free treats for the day. It’s food they were going to eat anyway, so you can use as much of it as you like for training and calming games without worrying about overfeeding.

Rule two: teeth on skin ends the game. Every time. But here’s the part most advice gets backwards - you remove yourself, not the puppy. If you pick your puppy up and carry them somewhere, you’re still engaging with them, and even telling-off attention is attention.

So step over the baby gate. I’ve been known to step inside the puppy pen and shut the door behind me, with the puppy on the outside looking baffled. It doesn’t need to be long. The point is that biting you achieves nothing - no squeak, no game, no reaction.

If someone else is in the house, they can call the puppy away instead and reward them with a biscuit for coming - and no, that doesn’t teach your puppy that biting earns treats. You’re rewarding the coming-away, with another behaviour in between.

Honestly, if teaching a dog were as simple as “one treat near a behaviour and it’s learned forever”, recall and lead walking would be the easiest jobs in the world.

Then switch to something calming - sniffing, licking, chewing - and if the checklist says your puppy is tired, it’s nap time. Into the pen, maybe with something to lick or chew, and you can sit quietly next to them while they settle. What you don’t do is keep handling a bitey, overtired puppy and give them more chances to practise.

One more thing, and for gundog puppies it might be the most important habit of all: notice the good.

When your puppy picks up one of their own toys, praise them. Tell them what a good boy or girl they are.

My dogs get a standing ovation for carrying their own toys, because I want them to feel brilliant about it - and because a mouth that’s full of toy has no room for your ankles.

What usually happens is the opposite: the puppy carries their toy around, we breathe a sigh of relief and ignore them, and the first attention they get is when teeth meet a sleeve. We give attention exactly backwards - and it’s worth flipping.

The puppy witching hour - why evenings are worse

Dogs are naturally most active at dusk and dawn. So the 6am zoomies and the evening witching hour - the little piranha bouncing off the walls, chaos with teeth - are completely normal, and sometimes you just have to ride them out.

But if we can predict it, we can prevent it. At witching hour your puppy doesn’t need more exercise or more stimulation. They need less. This is when I time an evening chew, or lay a little kibble trail in the garden saved from dinner, or do a few minutes of easy training before the glazed-eyes point of no return.

Once they’re in that zone, it’s not the time to train. It’s the time to manage. A stuffed Kong with some of their dinner - which you can freeze - gives them licking and chewing to bring themselves down with.

A quick word on chews, because I see this mistake in almost every home I visit: too many chews, available all the time.

When something is always there, it stops being valuable. I leave non-edible chews down for anytime access - buffalo horns, antlers, cow hooves - and I save the edible chews for the moments I actually need them, like witching hour, when they help a puppy regulate.

Pick up the finished ones. Scarcity is what keeps them working.

Does teething make biting worse?

Here’s an honest answer: there’s no meaningful research on how much teething hurts puppies. But I’ve seen enough to believe it does. Puppies who pick up food and spit it back out. Just recently, a 14-week-old puppy in one of my classes was acting completely out of character - bouncing off the walls, not listening, and when she finally took a treat from me, she whimpered. That’s not naughtiness. That’s a sore mouth.

Teething also disrupts sleep, and research suggests sleep-deprived dogs feel pain more keenly. So a teething puppy is doubly cranky - their mouth hurts and they’re shattered. It comes with the territory, and mostly you ride it out while making sure your puppy isn’t practising biting you in the meantime.

For the sore gums themselves: people suggest frozen carrots, but I find them too hard for a puppy to get into. Chilled carrot or cucumber from the fridge is softer and works better.

My favourite is homemade: cut a tea towel into strips, plait them, soak the plait in water with a little flavour - a teaspoon of spring water from a tuna tin, or the smallest smear of yoghurt - then freeze it in a ziplock bag. Give it under strict supervision so your puppy is soothing their gums on it, not eating it. And keep toys within reach everywhere. I’ve held up a dog bed between me and a frantically teething puppy more than once. Whatever gets you both through.

Is my puppy’s biting aggressive?

I’m yet to meet a puppy whose biting I’d consider abnormal. Even the frantic, relentless, drawing-blood kind. It feels personal - it isn’t. It’s a normal puppy with needs that want meeting.

The things that genuinely make me sit up in a session are quieter than biting.

A puppy who’s petrified - cowering and hiding from people and the world.

Or a puppy who goes still and tense over a chew: a low growl, a hard stare when someone walks towards them. That’s not play biting, that’s the early shape of resource guarding, and it’s worth getting qualified help with early - not because your puppy is bad, but because caught early it changes easily, and handled badly it doesn’t.

I know that one from hard personal experience (read Nika’s story here).

“My puppy only bites me” - a real story

A friend of mine has a Sprocker. She told me more about her feelings towards the puppy, than a client typically would.

As a puppy, this dog would launch at her on the sofa, day after day and only ever at her - never her husband. She was convinced the puppy hated her and that it was personal. She sent me video after video of it happening.

Here’s what was actually going on. She worked from home; her husband went to the office. She was simply there more, so she bore the brunt of an overtired puppy’s biting. Nothing personal about it at all. She was also the puppy’s main caregiver – doing most of the training, walking, feeding, interactions.

Working together over Zoom, we changed a handful of things. She stepped behind a baby gate when teeth came out. We introduced retrieving games and made a fuss of the puppy every time she carried her own toys. We added more mental stimulation. And the biggest one: enforced naps, because this puppy was nowhere near getting enough sleep. The biting improved dramatically.

That Sprocker is three and a half now. My friend is the centre of her universe, and her husband has been relegated to the spare human. They’re having a wonderful life together.

What I wish every owner knew about puppy biting

The word “no” means nothing to a puppy. The word “gentle” means nothing to a puppy. Yelping or squealing when they bite - the classic advice, because “that’s what littermates do” - doesn’t work either. There’s no evidence littermates do any such thing, and having watched plenty of litters, my own included, I can tell you what actually happens when one puppy squeaks: the others pile in. All squealing teaches your puppy is that you are the world’s most amazing squeaky toy.

Our job is not to tell puppies off for biting. It’s to teach them how to play with humans safely - toys in hands, teeth-on-skin ends the game, plenty of sleep, needs met, and a standing ovation every time they choose their own toy.

And one last thing. Puppy biting is normal, but normal doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, and it’s absolutely fine to reach out for support.

This is exactly what we cover in our puppy classes at Mapledurham and Sulhamstead - and if you’d rather have someone at your home, going through your actual routine - the naps, the chews, where the baby gates go - that’s what our 1-2-1 puppy training is for. Get in touch and we’ll work out what fits. Info@dogsbedogs.co.uk