Puppy House Training: How To Teach Your Puppy To Use A Doggy Toilet Area

Training a puppy/dog to relieve herself in an appropriate toilet area (indoors or outdoors) is actually pretty simple.

First, absolutely prevent your puppy from making any mistakes around the house. A single mistake often leads to a bunch more and then, before you know it, you have a full-blown house soiling habit. Try to make housetraining errorless. When you’re home but cannot devote 100% of your attention to your puppy, confine her to her doggy den, such as a crate or small room (short-term confinement area). If you are away for more than an two hours, confine her to a playpen (long-term confinement area) that has an appropriate dog toilet.

Never allow your puppy unsupervised run of the house. When she is housetrained, she may enjoy your house and full luxurious use of its furniture (if you so decide) for life. If your puppy begins to make “mistakes”, you’ll probably start restricting her freedom and if you don’t manage to break the house soiling habit (that you allowed her to develop), the odds are that she will not be welcome in your house for long.

Do not be duped by your puppy’s cuteness and her sweet and innocent look; always try and visualize your puppy as a grotesquely full and imminently voiding bladder and rectum deceptively camouflaged in an endearing furry outer layer. And so, I repeat, when you are away from home, always leave your puppy in her playpen and when you are home make sure that your puppy is confined to a crate.

Second, stack the deck, so that your puppy naturally wants to use a toilet area.

When you are away from home, put your puppy in a long-term confinement area, such as an exercise pen or small utility room or bathroom, that is three times as long as it is wide, with a bed at one end and a toilet at the other. If you plan on leaving your puppy for more than two hours, then she must have access to an appropriate toilet area.

If you would like your pup to eliminate only outdoors as an adult, it’s a good idea, to locate the puppy pen, so that the toilet is close to a door to the outside. If you would like your puppy to use an indoor toilet, it’s best to place the toilet in its permanent location from the outset and create your pen around it.

Puppies will naturally start to use the toilet area of their own volition because they have strong natural preferences about where they like to eliminate. Puppies much prefer to eliminate far away from their sleeping area and in areas that smell of urine. Adult dogs prefer to eliminate on the same type of surface that they used when growing up. So, use a square of grass sod for the toilet. Change the turf just once a week (to preserve the smell of urine) but clean up the feces daily and as soon as possible because dogs do not like to defecate close to days-old feces. Your puppy will quickly develop a strong preference for eliminating on grass and so, will naturally want to eliminate outdoors, especially if you handsomely reward her for doing so.

When you are at home, or on walks, praise your pup and give her three food reward morsels every time she pees and five morsels every time she poops in an appropriate toilet area. If your puppy is confined indoors, take her to the toilet on an hourly basis. Keep your pup on leash so that she doesn’t wander off en route. Each reward will increase the likelihood that she will want to eliminate in the toilet area in the future and therefore, decrease the likelihood that she will eliminate elsewhere. There is only so much urine and feces to go round and so, if your pup urinates or defecates in her toilet, there is less urine and feces to deposit anywhere else.

For additional information, Go to the Resources section in this website and download (for free) my BEFORE You Get Your Puppy book and then, please email the book to every puppy/dog owner that you know.