Thanks everyone. He has 1-1.5 hours lead walking a day and 2 good off lead runs and plays in the house too. We are trying not to overexercise him until he is age 1 as he is a large breed to prevent hip problems and I do worry a bit that he might be getting a bit too much exercise for his hips but he is an active pup so does need to burn off his energy. He also goes to training class which tires him out.

We will keep persevering.

Hi Heidi the exercise recommended by many is 5 minutes per month of age for lead walking, plus lots of play which doesn't put so much strain on the joints.

We are trying to keep his walks to 2 30 minute sessions, but he sometimes gets a bit more but they are often slow walks as he has a good sniff along the way. The way he runs round the garden and house is sometimes a worry re his hips as he is very bouncy. He tends not to settle even when he is tired though and still keeps playing with his toys in the house even when he looks worn out. He has a couple of sleeps in his cage through the day and the rest of the time he never stops til about 9-10pm at night.

I think mine would be climbing the walls to be honest. We walk in woods and fields for about an hour and a half with them off lead the whole time. We build some training into the walks so that obviously the tempo of the walk is variable and they have to concentrate on different things at different times throughout the walk. It's good practise for their recall and gets them used to obeying commands with distractiions. Also a lot of the ground we walk on is quite soft, we build in some fetch too, so they get lots of chasing about. I don't allow mine to charge about indoors and jumping off the stairs is worse for their hips than walking. I would not allow jumping up either, that is something I made plain very early on. I would certainly give a stern " get off" and if necessary remove him and make him sit and then down. Mine get no attention unless bums are on the floor. If necessary I would put him on a lead in the house and make sure he stayed down that way until he learnt. I must admit I have avoided any games that involved them jumping at me at all, they don't understand if it is acceptable some of the time and not others. For me it is never acceptable for a Dobermann in excess of 7stone to jump on me.

We had a similar problem and probably still have the odd incident where our dobie gets a bit over excited but she's now acutely aware of her bite pressure and is withdrawing her self from the situation.

We tried the yelping but she took that as bite harder so instead used a firm no and then asked for kisses. It hurt like hell at first but we didn't pull our hand away and she stopped giving a small lick to the wounded area. Now when she's getting excited in play (which seems to be all the time) we can stop the biting before it starts by using the words ah ah ah kiss.

We also got her used to using her teeth properly with food - she will nibble on command (with her toast in the morning) and giving her tiny morsels within our fingers, which she has to gently remove. It was probably the food training that had the most success in controlling her mouthing.

I thought it was never going to end a few months ago but perserverance and consistency has certainly paid off.

Good luck with it