Remedial Training for Bennie

We had a bad day with Bennie yesterday; he ate 2 tissues (at different times) and some hair. Problem is he bit at me when I tried to get it. Back to training.

Thing is we can't always know the search terms for what the undesire behaviour is. We can pat Bennie and remove his food no problem. We've practiced Take it/Leave it with quite a bit of success. With big items he drops them for us to take as soon as he knows we know. Things that can fit in his mouth though...it's a bitey fight to get it back if we get it out at all. After looking it up it seems that he has possessive aggression.

So hand feeding it is with take it/leave it interspersed. He's getting better about trusting me to give him his food after just a couple meals. I'm also playing with a tug toy and doing the "drop it" command. As a side benefit he's learning to play fetch.

We know this is puppy behaviour and that he will grow out of it to some degree. Already with the tug toy he's biting at the other end instead of my hand like he did a couple weeks ago. If this doesn't calm him down in a week or so, we'll call a behaviourist for some more training tools. We don't remember any of our other puppies being quite this possessive BUT we haven't had a puppy for 12 years and regardless, we still need to make sure it doesn't pop up unexpectedly.