Raising a puppy:
Housetraining
Your canine newcomer is just itching to learn
household manners. She wants to please, but she has to
learn how. Before the young pup can be trusted to have full run of the house,
somebody must teach the house rules. There’s no point keeping house rules a
secret. Somebody has to tell the pup. And that somebody is you. Otherwise, your puppy will
let her imagination run wild in her quest for occupational therapy to pass the
time of day. Without a firm grounding in canine domestic etiquette, your puppy
will be left to improvise in her choice of toys and toilets. The pup will no doubt eliminate in
closets and on carpets, and your couches and curtains will be viewed as
mere playthings for destruction. Each mistake is a potential disaster, since it
heralds many more to come. If your pup is allowed to make “mistakes,” bad
habits will quickly become the status quo, making it necessary to break bad
habits before teaching good ones.
Begin by teaching your puppy good habits from the very first day
she comes home. Remember, good habits are just as
hard to break as bad habits. Most pressing, your puppy’s living quarters need
to be designed so that housetraining and chewtoy-training are errorless.
Confinement will help you housetrain
Successful domestic doggy education involves teaching your puppy
to train herself through confinement. This prevents mistakes and establishes
good habits from the outset. When you are physically or mentally absent,
confine your puppy to keep her out of mischief and to help her learn how to act
appropriately.
The more you confine your puppy to her Doggy Den and Puppy Playroom during her first few weeks
at home, the more freedom she will enjoy as an adult dog for
the rest of her life. The more closely you adhere to the following
puppy-confinement program, the sooner your puppy will be housetrained and chewtoy trained. And, as
an added benefit, your puppy will learn to settle down quickly, quietly,
calmly, and happily
.
.
Housetraining your puppy when you’re not at home
Keep your puppy confined to a fairly small puppy playroom, such as
the kitchen, bathroom, or utility room. You can also use an exercise pen to
cordon off a small section of a room. This is your puppy’s long-term
confinement area. It should include:
1.
A comfortable bed
2.
A bowl of fresh water
3.
Plenty of hollow chewtoys (stuffed
with dog food)
4.
A doggy toilet in
the farthest corner from her bed
Obviously, your puppy will feel the need to bark, chew, and eliminate throughout the course of
the day, and so she must be left somewhere she can satisfy her needs without causing
any damage or annoyance. Your puppy will most probably eliminate as far as
possible from her sleeping quarters-in her doggy toilet. By removing all
chewable items from the puppy playpen-with the exception ofhollow
chewtoys stuffed with kibble-you will make chewing
chewtoys your puppy’s favorite habit, a good habit! Long-term confinement
allows your puppy to teach herself to use an appropriate dog toilet, to want to
chew appropriate chewtoys, and to settle down quietly.
Housetraining your puppy when you’re at home
Enjoy short play and training sessions
hourly. If you cannot pay full attention to your puppy’s every single
second, play with your pup in his Puppy Playpen, where a suitable toilet and toys
are available. Or, for periods of no longer than an hour at a time, confine
your puppy to his Doggy Den (short-term close confinement area), such as a
portable dog crate. Every hour, release your puppy and quickly take him to his
doggy toilet. Your puppy’s short-term confinement area should include a comfortable
bed, and plenty of hollow chewtoys (stuffed with dog food).
It is much easier to watch your pup if he is settled down in a
single spot. Either you may move the crate so that your puppy is in the same
room as you, or you may want to confine your pup to a different room to start
preparing him for times when he will be left at home alone. If you do not like the idea of
confining your puppy to a dog crate, you may tie the leash to
your belt and have the pup settle down at your feet. Or you may fasten the
leash to an eye-hook in the baseboard next to your puppy’s bed, basket, or mat. To prevent the chewtoys from rolling out
of reach, also tie them to the eye-hook.
Train your puppy to housetrain himself
Housetraining and chewtoy-training will
be quick and easy if you adhere to the puppy confinement plan above, which
prevents the puppy from making mistakes and prompts the puppy to teach herself
household etiquette. If you vary from the program, you will likely experience
problems. Unless you enjoy problems, you must reprimand yourself for any mistakes you
allow your puppy to make.
Preventing housetraining mistakes
Housesoiling is a spatial problem,
involving perfectly normal, natural, and necessary canine behaviors (peeing
and pooping) performed in inappropriate places.
Housetraining is quickly and easily
accomplished by praising your puppy and offering a food treat when she eliminates in an appropriate
toilet area. Once your pup realizes that her eliminatory products are the
equivalent of coins in a food vending machine-that feces and urine may be
cashed in for tasty treats-your pup will be clamoring to eliminate
in the appropriate spot, because soiling the house does not bring equivalent
fringe benefits.
Housesoiling is also a temporal problem:
either the puppy is in the wrong place at the right time (confined indoors with
full bladder and bowels), or the puppy is in the right place at the wrong time
(outdoors in the yard or on a walk, but with empty bladder and bowels).
Timing is the essence of successful housetraining. Indeed, efficient and effective housetraining depends upon the owner
being able to predict when the puppy needs to eliminate so that she may be
directed to an appropriate toilet area and more than adequately rewarded for doing the right thing in the
right place at the right time.
Usually, puppies urinate within half a minute of
waking up from a nap and usually defecate within a couple of minutes of that.
But who has the time to hang around to wait for puppy to wake up and pee and
poop? Instead it’s a better plan to wake up the puppy yourself, when you are
ready and the time is right.
Short-term confinement offers a convenient means to accurately
predict when your puppy needs to relieve herself. Confining a pup to a small
area strongly inhibits her from urinating or defecating, since she doesn’t want
to soil her sleeping area. Hence, the puppy is highly
likely to want to eliminate immediately after being released from confinement.
If errorless housetraining is so easy, why do so many
dog owners experience problems? Here are some common questions and answers that help make
errorless housetraining work.
Using an indoor doggy toilet
For the best doggy toilet, equip a litter
box or cover a piece of old linoleum with what will be the
dog’s eventual toilet material. For example, for rural and suburban pups who
will eventually be taught to relieve themselves outside on earth or grass, lay
down a roll of turf. For urban puppies who will eventually be taught to
eliminate at curbside, lay down a couple of thin concrete tiles. Your puppy
will soon develop a very strong natural preference for eliminating on similar
outdoor surfaces whenever he can.
If you have a backyard dog
toilet area, in addition to the indoor playroom toilet, take
your pup to his outdoor toilet in the yard whenever you release him from his
doggy den. If you live in an apartmentand do not have a yard, teach your puppy to use
his indoor toilet until he is old enough to venture outdoors at three months of
age.
Training you puppy to use an outdoor toilet
For the first few weeks,
take your puppy outside on-leash. Hurry to his toilet area and then
stand still to allow the puppy to circle (as he would normally do before eliminating).
Reward your puppy each time he “goes” in the designated spot. If you have a
fenced yard, you may later take your puppy outside off-leash and let him choose
where he would like to eliminate. But make sure to reward him differentially according to
how close he hits ground zero. Offer one treat for doing it outside quickly,
two treats for doing it within, say, five yards of the doggy toilet, three
treats for within two yards, and five treats for a bull’s eye.