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Housetraining isn’t particularly tricky but it does call for vigilance, patience, plenty of commitment and above all, consistency. Get used to spending a significant amount of time in your garden, whatever the time of day, with your puppy on a lead, waiting to be ever so enthusiastic about puppy pee and poop.
If you are someone who does a lot of planning, and you should be if you’re getting a puppy, consider the time of year you bring your puppy home. Believe me, its a lot easier to make those frequent trips out into the garden in the long warm days of summer than during long cold winter nights.
The alternative to training your dog to go straight outside is to ‘paper’ train him that is to train him to go on newspaper, rather than in the garden. However, unless you own a toy breed, at some point you’ll want to re-train your pup to outside. Personally I think house training a dog once is enough, why go through the process twice? Especially since you’ll have to ‘untrain’ the pup not to use paper anymore, as well as training it to go outside. Therefore I advise ‘biting the bullet’ and going straight for the garden option.
Every un housetrained puppy or dog will have accidents in the house, and more likely, several. Expect this—it’s part of living with a puppy. However the more consistent you are in following the basic housetraining procedures, the faster your puppy will learn acceptable behaviour. It may take several weeks to housetrain your puppy, and with some of the smaller breeds, it might take longer. In addition some dogs, particularly submissive dogs may urinate when excited, particularly when greeting someone they feel is dominant. This isn’t a house training issue, and will be considered in a different article.
Over the coming months we shall be covering everything you need to know about owning a new dog including selecting the right breed for you and your family.
If you currently own a puppy or are indeed contemplating getting one, we would love to hear from you – we want to be both informative and fun!
For our first edition, we thought it would be a good idea to make a list of questions prospective dog owners should ask themselves before taking on the responsibility and commitment of ownership.