Rough Play
Is it Good or Bad?

by Trish King

We have a young indeterminate canine mix in our house. Luke looks like he could be a Bull Terrier, Border Collie, Basenji mix, but really we don’t really know since he was brought in from Madera County in our Pet Partnership Program. He is about 10 months old or so, deep in adolescence. He loves to play with our other dogs, but unfortunately he tends to get a bit out of control occasionally, so we have to rein him in. We don’t want him to intimidate the other dogs nor to make them want to avoid him. 

I see quite a few dogs in consults who love to play with other dogs but don’t seem to have any boundaries. They start off playing well and then get more and more excited. Sometimes they play so hard they get into fights and sometimes they become aggressive themselves.  

A complicating factor is that dogs within a family often play roughly with no problems at all. They body slam, muzzle punch roll and bite with reckless abandon. At the end of a session they shake themselves off and go about their business. Is this kind of familial play okay? If it’s not okay, what do you do about it?

The answer is, um, well, it depends…

If you’d asked me that question two years ago, I would have said there would be few problems with that. Like kids roughhousing with each other, I figured this was healthy play, cooperating at a very energetic level, so to speak. Now however, because of Luke as well as some of my clients’ dogs, I have some reservations. In our own family the other older dogs could stop him from his over-enthusiastic play sometimes, but they couldn’t all the time. In fact our older dogs are just too tolerant. When he hangs onto their necks they just stand and wait, either for him get tired of it or for one of us to intervene.  

But what if the other dogs had been able to hold their own? Would we still have redirected his energy? That depends, actually. If he was only going to play with our other dogs, perhaps not. But if I were planning on taking him to dog parks or friends’ homes, absolutely yes. 

Imagine a group of children playing in a schoolyard. Most of them are happily climbing structures or playing organized games like soccer or baseball. Off in the corner there is a bunch of young boys roughhousing, including punching each other. Harmless play, right? However, after a few minutes, one of the youngsters inadvertently punches another too hard on the arm, and the other one punches him back, again too hard. Unless someone, a yard monitor most likely, intervenes, the play can quickly escalate into a fight. It’s no one’s fault really; it was just that the kids were overexcited.  Of course, you can explain to children that they shouldn’t play that roughly, and some of them will actually listen!

Teaching fair play

Dogs don’t have the ability to communicate that clearly, and their rough play can also escalate into fighting without some inhibiting factor. So to help them, you have to show them. One way to do that is to interrupt play by calling your dog out of it, cueing him to sit, then releasing him back into play. Your hope is to calm him down just a bit merely by stopping the behavior. This can work well, especially if you’ve been practicing the exercise since your dog was a puppy.  

But perhaps you have adopted an adolescent and so never had the chance to take him to puppy classes. Now you find you have a reckless, rough riding young dog who pays absolutely no attention to you when he’s involved in playing with other dogs, friends or strangers. Obviously you can start training that behavior now, but you can also take a few other steps. One step is to try tiring your dog somewhat before allowing play to begin. This might mean a half hour walk or maybe a play session of your own. The edge will be off your dog, and he may not have the e