About 90% of American pet puppies live indoors with their owners. Dogs kept inside with your family and you need to be housebroken. Potty training a puppy is one of the situations many owners find themselves overwhelmed by. It is not that difficult, it doesn’t have to be messy and housebreaking can be accomplished without a struggle. Training needs to receive a significant amount of time devoted to it in order for it to be successful. You will need time, a little more involvement, as well as some training tools such as puppy training pads.
The New Doggie is the Boss
For dogs and puppy owners, there are two major rules that you should stick to with puppy training. Remember to never punish your puppy for something you didn’t see him do. And second, praise your puppy for the things he did do right. Don’t let training lead to situations where your only action is saying ‘no’ when you catch your pet doing something wrong. Praise them or offer them a reward when they do the right thing.
House Training/Breaking Puppies
There are different ways to housebreak puppies. When starting indoors, encourage your pup to use puppy training pads or papers to go to the bathroom on. These pads are treated with chemicals that make puppies want to use them to do their business. The moment you observe them beginning the pre-elimination routine of pacing and sniffing at the floor, lift up the puppy and quietly relocate them to the paper or puppy training pads, and then offer them a reward for appropriately going to the bathroom.
After things are progressing well and the puppy is using the puppy training pads or newspapers regularly, you can then locate them a little closer to the door and eventually outside. The change is made from concentrating on bathroom habits at a location inside the house to a location outside the house. In the very near future you will have no need for papers or training pads indoors.
The only major problem or setback with this puppy potty training method is that it takes a longer period of time to encourage the puppy to do his bathroom rituals indoors. When house training puppies, other widely used techniques might work; you could, for example, use puppy crate training or cages, always accompanied by the owner’s close supervision.
The maximum amount of time that dogs can hold their bladders and bowels is between seven and eight hours, so you should keep that in mind when using a crate or a cage, trying to housebreak your dog. This method usually works as most dogs treat cages and crates as their sleeping places and they do no want to soil their beds because they will be forced to lie in the mess. It is not a good idea to crate a puppy for long periods of time.
This is not to say, though, that continual supervision involves crates or cages, and paper or puppy pads. It is here that dog owners opt to spend whatever time is necessary with their pups. This works good for those who are retired, work from home, or any owner that can spend lots of time with the puppy. With this method, pet owners usually hustle their puppy outside as soon as they notice the pre-potty signs. A constant watch must be kept on puppies to make sure that there are no accidents or slip-ups.
To sum up, puppy housebreaking and training should be treated as part of the ‘come’ and ‘stay’ command trainings. However, toilet training and housebreaking your puppy will be the messiest types of training, and generally have more headaches than other sorts of dog training. Don’t give up!