Housebreaking Your Dog In A Hurry

Housetraining

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If this dog, or a prior dog, has gone all over the house, you may need to check for. Always assume that any new dog you bring into your home is not housetrained. Even if he was trained once, the stress of a new environment, time in a shelter, new signals and routines can all undo his housetraining. The good news is that if your rescue dog was housetrained once, re-training him should be relatively quick. Males can wear belly bands and females can wear panties with half of an incontinence pad tucked in.

Belly bands can also help protect your furniture from a dog that marks. We will receive a donation for every purchase you make through Amazon Smile. Our trainers would be glad to help you. Come pick the brain of one of our trainers and go home with a few new tricks up your sleeve.

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We offer behavior and training advice; sponsor FREE workshops on a variety of topics; run positive dog training, behavior-related, and sports classes; refer dog parents to trainers, dog walkers, and other professionals; and send an e-newsletter with articles, resources, and announcements. Getting Started Make sure you have bought your housetraining supplies and have made your decisions about where outside your puppy should go before you bring your puppy home.

Dogs will rarely soil where they sleep. Be sure the crate is big enough for your puppy to turn around, but not so big that he can pee on one side and curl up on the other. Feeding your dog in his crate with the door open and throwing in treats for him to find are two ways to help your dog like his crate. Keep a leash by the door or around your waist, so that you are ready to take your dog out at any time. Take your dog outside on leash, even if you have a yard, so that you can be certain that he has actually gone.

Choose a place in your yard or just outside your home where you want your puppy to eliminate. Every time you take your dog outside, you will go straight to that area and wait. Gates or Exercise Pens: Have treats, cut into pea-size pieces, on you, so you can reward your puppy immediately within 3 seconds when he eliminates outside. Accidents will happen, so be prepared with a cleaner that is designed to eradicate the odor. This will make it less likely that your dog will smell his first mistake and then use that spot again. Consistent Routines Consistent schedules, including feeding schedules, are essential for successful housetraining.

Putting it on Cue Going potty and going for a walk should be two separate issues. Accidents Happen No matter how much planning you do, accidents can happen.

Teaching Your Dog to Eliminate on Command

If this dog, or a prior dog, has gone all over the house, you may need to check for stains with a black light available at hardware stores and then use a steam cleaner, not on a hot setting, for set-in stains and odors. Re-Training A Rescue Dog Always assume that any new dog you bring into your home is not housetrained. Your dog could have a urinary tract infection, bladder stones, or parasites. A dog may roll over on his back and pee slightly or poop may just fall out when a dog is afraid of someone or something.

Sometimes, a dog will urine mark to claim territory around an unfamiliar dog. This is most common among males, but an occasional female will do it, too. Dogs raised in puppy mills lived, peed, and pooped in their kennels. These dogs will go to the bathroom in their crates, but may not go outside on grass. If you have a puppy mill dog, housetraining will likely be a much slower process.

Housebreaking your puppy: Do's and don'ts

Key Points to Remember Take your puppy out at regular intervals, so you have plenty of opportunities to reward your puppy for eliminating outside. Your pup should go out after sleeping, eating, playing, and before bedtime. If your puppy starts walking in circles or otherwise looking restless, toss in an extra bathroom break.

Ah, yes, that is why housetraining is simple but not always easy. If you already have your pup, you will need to either find a skilled and willing puppy daycare provider, or set up a safe, puppy-proofed environment with wall-to-wall newspapers or pee pads, and recognize that your housetraining program will probably proceed more slowly. You cannot crate him for the eight to 10 hours a day that you are gone — you are likely to destroy his den-soiling inhibitions, cause him to hate and fear his crate, and possibly trigger the onset of separation anxiety.

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When you are home, be extra diligent about your housetraining protocol, and as your pup starts to show a preference for one corner of his papered area you can start slowly diminishing the size of the covered space. Continue crating your puppy at night.

Some pups are sleeping through the night by Week 2.

Others need nighttime breaks for a few more weeks. During the day, continue to take him out immediately upon waking, minutes after each meal, and after play and naps. Until your puppy is several months old and consistently eliminating outdoors, you must keep her either in a crate, on a leash, or under your direct supervision. This will eventually translate into him getting excited to let you know he has to go out. If you want him to do some other specific behavior to tell you he has to go, such as taking a bow, or ringing a bell, start having him do that behavior before you take him out.

By now, you should be able to tell when your puppy is just about to squat in his designated place. Stretch his bathroom excursions to 90 minutes apart, and start keeping a daily log — writing down the time, whether he did anything outside, and if so, what he did.

Make note of any housetraining mistakes — when and where they occurred. Crate your puppy at night. I keep my dogs crated at night until they are at least a year old, and until I am totally confident that they can be trusted to hold their bowels and bladder and keep their puppy teeth to themselves. During the day, try stretching his bathroom intervals to two hours, still remembering to take him out after all meals, play sessions, and naps.

This is especially helpful for communication purposes if two or more family members are sharing puppy-walking duties. Also continue to elicit the desired bathroom signal behavior before you take him out, and to use your bathroom cue outdoors, prior to the actual onset of elimination. By the end of this week, your puppy should be leading you on his leash to the bathroom spot.

Look for this behavior as an indication that he is making the connection to the spot that you want him to use. Assuming all is going well, stretch daytime intervals to three hours, plus meal, play and nap trips. Go with him to his fenced-yard bathroom spot off-leash, to confirm that he is going there on his own, without you having to lead him.

Consistent Routines

Keep crating your puppy at night. Gradually increase the time between bathroom breaks to a maximum of four hours, plus meals, play, and naptime. You still need to go out with him most of the time, but you can occasionally send him out to his bathroom spot in his fenced yard all on his own, watching through the door or window to be sure he goes to his spot and gets the job done.

By this time, accidents in the house should be virtually nonexistent. As long as the program is progressing well, you can begin phasing out your daily log. As your pup continues to mature over the next eight months, he will eventually be able to be alone left for up to eight hours at a time, perhaps slightly longer.

At that point, you can break out the champagne and celebrate — you and your puppy have come of age! If your housetraining-program-in-progress relapses, back up a week or two in the process and keep working from there. The longer you wait, the more ground you have to make up. If your pup has diarrhea, not only is it impossible for him to comply with housetraining, he may also be seriously ill. Puppies can dehydrate to a life-threatening degree very quickly. Contact your veterinarian immediately. If your-paper-trained pup refuses to go on anything other than paper, take a sheet of newspaper or pee pad outside and have him go on that.

Each subsequent trip, reduce the size of the fresh sheet of paper or pad until it is gone. Try the bare crate floor or a coated metal grate instead, and set your alarm to wake you up at night as often as necessary to enable you to consistently take him out before he soils his crate. Neutering your male dog between the ages of eight weeks and six months will minimize the development of assertive territorial leg-lifting. If at any time your reliably-housetrained dog begins having accidents in the house, have him examined by your veterinarian in case there is a physical cause.

Remember that drugs such as Prednisone can cause increased water intake, which causes increased urination. If it is not a medical problem, evaluate possible stress factors and return to a basic housetraining program. When your dog has learned to eliminate on cue, start asking him to poop and pee on various surfaces, including grass, gravel, cement, and dirt. Dogs can easily develop a substrate preference — grass, for example — and may refuse to go to the bathroom on anything but their preferred surface.

If you are ever in a location where there is no grass, you and your dog could be in trouble. If your situation is such that your pup must constantly be asked to wait to go for longer periods than is reasonable, consider litter box training. Lots of people do this, especially those with small dogs and those who live in highrise apartments. This also resolves the substrate-preference problem. This is not my first rodeo, but I'm stumped. I've housetrained 3 dogs from puppyhood, and have had 5 rescues, all adults. The 5th, who arrived less than two weeks ago, is a bit of a puzzle.

This little girl was found as a stray.

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