How To Potty Train A Puppy (Or Adult Dog)
What is the easiest, fastest way to potty train a puppy? Potty training your new puppy is easy if we give the puppy what he needs to learn. It’s important to follow a plan that sets your puppy up for success by preventing accidents (as much as possible) and heavily rewarding the action of eliminating outdoors. Here are 6 easy steps that make it easy for puppies to learn this important part of living with humans.
What You’ll Need To Potty Train Your Puppy:
To potty train your puppy, you will need two items:
– A crate or a harness with a 6-foot leash or tether attached to you or an object
– A baggy with treats or kibble in it
Note: You won’t need puppy pads unless you want your puppy to grow up to be an adult dog that uses puppy pads.
1. Take Your puppy to his potty area frequently
Take your leashed puppy outside to the same spot every waking hour for the first week or two. You must go outside with him every time and you must bring some good treats (bits of meat), or even some kibble with you in your pocket. Don’t interact with puppy much until he produces. Stay outside with him until he goes potty. As soon as he does, praise profusely/enthusiastically and feed some treats to really let him know he did a good thing and reinforce so he will do more of it. Stay outside and play with him for a few minutes after he potties.
2. Praise clearly and enthusiastically
When puppy eliminates in his spot, praise dramatically using an elimination cue so he knows exactly what he has done, and then give the food reinforcer right after. This way your praise in itself will become very meaningful and reinforcing to Puppy.
Your puppy will make the connection that “good Spot” represents something he loves (food). He will be completely clear on how to get you to say those words when he is outside. Soon you will be able to say “spot” and he will be conditioned to immediately find a place to eliminate, which is a handy thing.
3. Confine Or Supervise Constantly
You will need to confine or supervise your puppy constantly for a few weeks. By supervise I mean watch your puppy and play with him. Don’t be on the computer, reading a book, making dinner, or doing anything else that will take your attention away from Puppy. If you aren’t going watch and/or play with him, he should be tethered to you, or confined to his crate.
Why Crate Train?
Most puppies won’t go to the washroom in a confined area. So a good crate for housetraining is just a little more than the puppy needs to stretch out for a nap and turn around in. Hopefully, your breeder crate trained your puppy before you purchased him. But if he didn’t, crate training can easily be done over a few days. You can use a harness and houseline and tether him close to you until he is comfortable and happy in his crate.
On this note- your puppy needs to learn about the world, and he can’t do this from inside a crate. Most of his waking time should be out of the crate, interacting with you.
4. Keep your puppy off absorbent surfaces like carpets and rugs.
5. Clean up accidents thoroughly
Any trace of urine smell triggers a puppy’s instinct to potty. Until housetraining is 100%, keep him off rugs and carpets and always supervise 100% when he is on his dog bed.
Clean up any accidents by mopping up the moppable mess with paper towels, and then applying pickling vinegar or a commercial urine stain and odor remover such as Nature’s Miracle.
6. Don’t Scold For Accidents.
Your puppy is an infant. He’s still learning to control his muscles. He’s going to have accidents. It happens. Besides, what you are trying to teach him isn’t a normal behavior for his species. Be patient and you’ll get faster results. If you scold a puppy for accident , he just learns his friendly human goes weird when he goes potty, so he’ll learn to do it when and where you aren’t looking- like being the couch. When he won’t eliminate in front of you it’ll be hard to get him to eliminate when he’s on leash. Trust me-you never want to go there, so never scold your puppy for having an accident. Just take him outside to his potty spot, clean up the accident, and ask yourself what you could do differently so it doesn’t happen again.
