Teething: What’s Normal, What Isn’t — and How to Get Through It

The Biology: What Is Actually Happening

Dogs are born toothless. The deciduous teeth — commonly called baby teeth or milk teeth — begin erupting at around two to three weeks of age. By six to eight weeks, when your puppy comes home, the full set of 28 deciduous teeth is in place. These are the sharp ones. They are sharp for a reason: at this age, the jaw muscles are weak, and the sharpness of the teeth compensates for the lack of bite force. It is nature’s way of allowing a small puppy to eat solid food while the jaw is still developing.

The transition to adult dentition begins at roughly twelve to sixteen weeks and follows a predictable sequence. The incisors — the small teeth at the front — go first. Then the premolars and canines follow, typically between four and six months. The molars, which have no deciduous predecessors, erupt last. By six to seven months, most puppies have their complete adult set of 42 teeth.

During this transition, the roots of the baby teeth are resorbed by the body. The adult tooth pushes upward from the jaw, the baby tooth loosens, and eventually falls out. This process is happening in multiple locations simultaneously, and the gum tissue is inflamed, swollen, and uncomfortable throughout.

Why the Lagotto Makes This Especially Challenging

All puppies teethe. But the Lagotto presents a specific combination of traits that makes the teething period more intense than in many other breeds.

Oral drive. The Lagotto is a working retriever — a breed selected for centuries to carry game in its mouth, to grip and hold, to use the mouth as a primary tool. That genetic drive to put things in the mouth does not wait for teething to begin. It is present from the start, and teething amplifies it considerably.

Intelligence and persistence. A Lagotto that discovers that biting a particular surface provides relief will return to that surface systematically. They are not randomly destructive. They are problem-solving — and they are good at it. This means that simply removing one target often results in the puppy finding another, usually one you did not anticipate.

The coat. This is the factor unique to the Lagotto. The dense, curly coat means that everything the puppy mouths — fabric, string, paper, leaves, fingers — tends to get caught in the curl. Baby teeth, which are hooked, are particularly effective at snagging fibres. The result is a puppy that appears to be biting you but is actually trying to disentangle something from its teeth and coat simultaneously. This looks more aggressive than it is.

What Actually Helps: The Evidence-Based Approach

There is a great deal of bad advice about teething on the internet, and sorting the useful from the harmful is harder than it should be. Here is what the veterinary literature and our direct experience with dozens of Lagotto puppies supports.

Appropriate Chews: The Single Most Important Intervention

The teething puppy needs to chew. This is not a preference. It is a neurological imperative — the counter-pressure of chewing against inflamed gums provides genuine pain relief through a mechanism similar to the way pressing on a bruise briefly reduces the sensation of pain. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania veterinary school have noted that puppies denied access to appropriate chewing materials during teething show increased cortisol levels, increased destructive behaviour, and longer recovery times from the teething period overall.

The goal is to provide chews that are firm enough to provide counter-pressure, yielding enough not to damage developing teeth, digestible if pieces break off, and long-lasting enough to sustain a chewing session. Two options stand above the rest:

A simple rotation of bully sticks and yak cheese, supplemented with frozen Kongs during peak discomfort, will carry most Lagotto puppies through teething with minimal destruction and maximum relief. Keep several on hand at all times — running out during peak teething at four months is a crisis that is entirely avoidable.

Managing the Biting: Redirection, Not Punishment

The puppy that bites your hand during teething is not being aggressive. It is in discomfort, its mouth is the centre of that discomfort, and your hand was the nearest available surface that provided counter-pressure. Punishing this — whether through physical correction, yelling, or time-outs — creates a problem worse than the one it solves. The puppy associates your hands with pain, or associates you with unpredictable reactions, and the trust that manding built begins to erode.

The approach that works is consistent redirection:

When the puppy’s teeth make contact with skin, calmly remove your hand and immediately offer an appropriate chew. No drama. No sharp “no.” No yelping — despite the widespread advice to yelp like a hurt puppy, research by Herron, Shofer, and Reisner (2009) at the University of Pennsylvania found that confrontational responses to puppy biting, including yelping, were associated with increased aggression in a significant percentage of dogs studied. What works is boring consistency: teeth on skin means the interesting thing (you) disappears and the appropriate thing (the chew) appears.

This will not work the first time. Or the fifth time. It will work by the fiftieth time, and it will work without damaging the relationship. Every family we have placed a puppy with who followed this approach reports the same arc: weeks of feeling like it will never end, followed by a sudden and noticeable decline in mouthing, followed by a puppy that stops biting hands altogether — usually well before the adult teeth are fully in.

Protecting Your Belongings

During peak teething, the Lagotto puppy will chew anything that provides the right texture and resistance. Baseboards, chair legs, shoes, remote controls, electrical cords, children’s toys, and books left at nose level are all vulnerable. The honest truth is that prevention is easier than correction.

Manage the environment. Use baby gates or exercise pens to restrict the puppy’s unsupervised access to rooms with valuable or dangerous items. Pick up shoes. Move cords behind furniture. Accept that for roughly three months, your house will need to be puppy-proofed the way you would childproof it for a toddler.

Provide legal alternatives in every room. If the puppy has access to a room, that room should contain at least one appropriate chew. The puppy cannot choose the right thing if the right thing is not available.

Bitter apple spray. This is the one deterrent product with reasonable evidence behind it. Applied to furniture legs and baseboards, it creates an unpleasant taste association. It does not work for all puppies — some Lagottos are indifferent to it — but for many it is effective enough to redirect chewing away from the treated surface and toward the available chew. Reapply daily during peak teething; the taste dissipates.

When to Call the Vet

Most teething is normal and resolves without veterinary intervention. But there are specific situations that warrant a call to your veterinarian:

At the routine veterinary visits that occur during your puppy’s vaccination schedule — typically at twelve, sixteen, and twenty weeks — ask your vet to check the teeth and note any retained deciduous teeth. Most will do this automatically, but it does not hurt to ask specifically. Early identification of retained teeth is much easier to address than late discovery.

This Part Ends

I want to close with the thing that is hardest to believe when you are in the middle of it: this part ends.

The biting stops. The chewing normalises. The frantic, mouthy, razor-toothed creature that shredded your favourite slippers at four months becomes the calm, gentle, deeply affectionate dog that rests its head in your lap at eighteen months and looks up at you with the same eyes — minus the needle teeth.

Every family we have placed a puppy with has gone through this. Every single one. And every single one, when we check in later, says the same thing: “It felt like it would never end, and then one day it just… did.”

The teething period in a Lagotto is typically twelve to sixteen weeks of genuine difficulty, inside a fifteen-to-seventeen-year relationship that will be one of the best things in your life. Keep the bully sticks stocked. Keep the redirection boring and consistent. Keep the yak cheese in rotation. And when you feel overwhelmed, call us. That is what we are here for — not just to place puppies, but to stand behind the families who take them home.

You are doing fine. Your puppy is doing fine. And this part ends.