A participial phrase is a group of words that aims at adding description to a sentence and that consists of a participle and modifiers and/or nouns, pronouns or noun phrases. The participial phrase that modifies the wrong noun in this excerpt is D. “pushing his plate away from the edge of the table,” because it is adding information or making reference to the closest subject in that sentence, that is the puppy, when the subject that is actually pushing the plate is the man.
A possible correction would be "while the man pushed his plate away from the edge of the table, the puppy walked away from him."
