One one of my dogs use to be quite snappy and use to like to bite ya hands quite hard when he was a puppy. You just have to tap their nose and say no each time they bite ya hands hard and get to aggressive, just tap nose and say no, and keep doing that any time they bite hard, they will soon learn to be more gentle even if they just trying to play. Seems you getting hte hang of it and showing who the boss is though, so progress sounds good.

Cheers guys, the women running the course did say that the floors are cleaned, it has been 2 weeks since his first injections.

Having good and bad days at the moment, trying something new today, doing the ouch but then putting him in the kitchen on his own for a few seconds as a time out.

With my current puppy, any attempt to do 70's & 80's style "I am your Boss" type stuff (and you need a still muzzle to gently tap nose) would escalate playful behaviour into a frantic and wilder play state, and pushing beyond into fear, would likely provoke an aggressive reaction.

I do know it has worked in past when we did not know better. But I think the pups it works with, are NOT the hardest ones to raise, gentler calmer methods work at least as well with them to.

You are right, some dogs are allot more sensitive and just a nice soft no can work good. Or tough maybe my tap on the nose sounded a bit wrong, it's actually a soft a appraoch (tap the nose very softly and go no in sort of an aggressive way but the puppy usually stops and is still very happy, depends on the temperament really)

I thought I could have easily mistrained my pup to be aggressive, from his reactions to traditional old school methods, that worked in past with other dogs. So it's not just "sensitive" dogs but the apparently less sensitive hard to curb, won't back down ones to.

Having fostered his sister who's had to be rescued, she actually soon showed some aggression issues after a few days of R+, so I'm even more sure of it once the fear of intimidation was removed. It's no good suppressing behaviours if you don't instill the positive ones you want, and generally soceity seems to love punishment and discipline (for others) more than real coaching, patience and teaching; so I'm now convinced by the consensus.

Even now, the people who had most trouble training their dogs, took the longest, advise me to copy their methods (obviously as they had so much trouble subduing a wilful dog they are experts). None of them seem to be questioning their approach, despite younger dogs being obviously sucessfully trained in much less time, with manners issues left mainly caused by playful exuberance. I guess psychologically if you spend a long time doing something, you cannot question it as easily as something you just tried for a short while.