Chihuahua Biting: Why Your Dog Bites and How to Stop It

My Chihuahua bites. It’s the sentence I hear most often in messages from club members, and it almost always comes with guilt: “Did I raise him wrong?”, “Is he aggressive?”, “Is he going to bite me?” Let’s take the drama down a notch, because there are four types of Chihuahua biting and only one is a real problem. The other three can be fixed at home.

Lorenzo bit everything that came within reach of his mouth between 3 and 6 months. Romeo, at 11, growls if you move him off his blanket at three in the morning. Neither of them is an aggressive dog, and each taught us something different.

This article is for general information and is not a substitute for advice from a veterinarian or a certified dog trainer.

Why does my Chihuahua bite? The 4 types of bites

The first thing to do with a Chihuahua who bites is to place him in this table. The approach is different for each row, and the most common mistake is using the puppy fix (ignore, pull your hand away) on a fearful dog, or the fear fix (distance, patience) on a puppy whose teeth simply hurt.

Why does my puppy bite my hands and ankles?

Between 3 and 6 months a Chihuahua swaps 28 baby teeth for 42 adult ones. His gums ache and he bites for relief. He also bites to play: it’s what he did with his littermates, and his littermates told him when he went too far. That job is now yours.

What you’re teaching is called bite inhibition: not to stop mouthing (that fades on its own once the adult teeth are in), but to learn how much pressure is too much.

1. As long as the nip is gentle, let it go. He’s learning to calibrate.
2. When he bites too hard, give a short, high-pitched “ouch,” like a puppy’s yelp. Pull your hand away and stay still for ten seconds. Playtime is over.
3. If he comes right back at it, leave. Get up and walk out of the room for half a minute. For a Chihuahua, being left alone is the worst consequence there is, and you didn’t do anything to him.
4. Come back and offer a chew toy. A firm rubber one, sized for his mouth, ideally chilled in the fridge. When he chews it, praise him.

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5. Hands are never toys. If you wiggle your fingers in front of his face to play, you’re teaching him the opposite.

Within two or three weeks the nips turn gentle. By 7 or 8 months, with the adult teeth in, they disappear. If what he’s chewing isn’t your hands but the furniture and your shoes, that’s a different problem with a different fix: why your Chihuahua is chewing furniture.

The Chihuahua who bites out of fear

This is the bite that matters. A frightened Chihuahua gives warnings: he goes stiff, turns his head away, shows the whites of his eyes (what trainers call whale eye), growls. If those warnings are ignored (because he’s tiny and “harmless”), he bites. And he bites harder than you’d expect.

The typical situations: picking him up when he doesn’t want to be held, cornering him to put on the harness, a child hugging him, a stranger reaching over the top of his head, nail trims.

What works:

• Respect the warning. If he growls, stop. That isn’t “letting him win”: it’s teaching him that a growl is enough and he doesn’t need to bite. A dog who gets punished for growling learns to bite without warning.
• Distance and time. Whatever scares him, from far away, with treats, for weeks. If it’s people, they shouldn’t touch him: they drop a treat and keep walking. The whole process is laid out in how to socialize a Chihuahua.
• Handling paired with treats. Touch a paw, treat. Put the harness on for one second, treat. Five minutes a day. It’s what we did so we could trim Lorenzo’s nails, and it’s in how to trim Chihuahua nails.
• Stop picking him up to “save” him. Every rescue confirms there was danger.

If he has already bitten someone hard enough to draw blood, or if the fear is directed at people in your own home, it’s time for a positive-reinforcement trainer or a veterinary behaviorist. Not because of the size of the dog, but because of the size of the problem. We go deeper in aggressive Chihuahua: why he growls and how to fix it.

The Chihuahua who growls over his bed, his food or his person

This is resource guarding, and in Chihuahuas the most common resource is a person: he growls when your partner comes near the bed, when another dog comes near you, when someone hugs you. It isn’t dominance or soap-opera jealousy: it’s a dog who learned that if he guards something, he gets to keep it.

What works:

• Trade, don’t take. Never pull something out of his mouth by force: offer something better and, when he lets go, say “drop it” and reward. With practice, letting go becomes a great deal.
• An “off” cue for getting down from the bed, taught with treats when there’s no conflict. “Off,” treat on the floor, twenty times a day for a week. Then you use it at night.
• Make the “intruder” the source of good things. If he growls at your partner, your partner hands out dinner and treats for a month.
• Don’t pick him up when he growls at another dog. You’re rewarding the growl. Step aside and keep walking.

Romeo growls if you move him off his blanket while he’s asleep. We learned to wake him with our voice before touching him and to ask for “off” with a treat: he climbs down grumbling, like a 60-year-old man, which is exactly what he is.

Why does my Chihuahua suddenly bite for no reason?

An adult dog who never bit and starts doing it is almost always in pain. Teeth (by age 5 most small dogs have periodontal disease), knees (a luxating patella hurts when he’s picked up), ears, spine. In seniors, add vision or hearing loss: he startles and bites before he recognizes who it is.

No amount of training fixes that: see the vet first, with a check of his mouth and joints. A Chihuahua who bites when you touch his hip doesn’t have a behavior problem. He has a knee.

What doesn’t work

• Tapping his muzzle, shaking him, the “alpha roll.” It raises fear, and fear is the only cause of serious bites. Besides, on a 5-pound dog, a smack is an injury.
• Punishing the growl. The growl is the emergency brake. Take away the brake and he goes straight to the bite.
• “He’s tiny, he’s harmless.” He isn’t. Worse, it teaches him biting has no consequences, right up until he bites a child.
• Bitter anti-chew sprays on your hands. They teach him that your hands are unpleasant. They’re for furniture, not for you.

Lorenzo, my fingers and the littermate he never had

Lorenzo came home at two months with no littermates to tell him “not like that.” My hand was the littermate. Eighteen days of “ouch,” hand away, cold chew toy, and by seven months he had his adult teeth and not a single nip. Today, at 2, he takes treats as if they were made of glass. What he does still do is guard me from anyone else’s hug, and with patience and trades we’re winning that one little by little.

What these dogs are really like, without the myth of the hysterical Chihuahua, is in the real Chihuahua temperament.

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