Dog Training Basics

Posts Tagged ‘potty training’

Getting a new puppy?  I’ll bet you are so excited.  I’m not going to break your excitement, but I will tell you that once you get your puppy home he will push your patience further than you thought it could go.  One of the first, and most difficult, tasks is to teach your dog to go outside to potty.  This takes patience and effort on your part.  The biggest question new owners ask all the time is how to potty train a puppy.

If you try to potty train your dog to go to potty outside before it is a month old you may be wasting your time.  It’s easier and better to start potty training your puppy around two months of age.  At this point, the best approach is to work out some kind of routine with your puppy.  Haphazard training rarely works.

If you jump up to take out the puppy every few minutes you will soon grow weary and your puppy may not get the point of too frequent visits outside.  Set up a schedule to take your puppy out about once every thirty minutes or so.  It’s also a good idea to take your puppy out before you sit down for a meal.  You don’t want to have to get up and take the puppy out when you are in the middle of eating.

Establishing a training routine and sticking to it will help you train your puppy more quickly.  It’s hard to accomplish without a schedule.  The sooner you establish a training schedule with your puppy, the better you will feel about your puppy and the more at ease the puppy will become.

Don’t think of a routine as overly ridged or harsh.  Working out a schedule may seem like more work than it actually is.  The point is, however, that in the long run your puppy will learn faster.  Routine and repetition are keys to your puppy’s potty training.

Puppies that refuse to potty outside can be especially perplexing.  Try to figure out why they refuse to go outside.  Try taking them to a different place in the yard.  With a little effort you will get your puppy potty trained and can move on to other puppy training adventures.  Keep up and be persistent. In doing so, you will learn how to house break a puppy.

Puppyhood is the “formative” period for your dog. What you teach him during this time will most likely stick with him the rest of his life. One of the most imperative things to get started is to train dogs to potty outside.

Developing a routine early on in your puppy’s life is a sure way to ease the strain that the potty training process can entail. Try starting out by getting your pup used to a particular life routine. This includes working up a schedule of sleeping, eating, and potty time. Make sure that you keep the schedule constant, such as feeding him at a certain time every day and taking him outside 15 minutes after.

If you can admit straight away that accidents will happen when it comes to your puppy, then you just may save a bit of sanity while dog potty training! You can help lessen accidents by keeping some newspaper in a dedicated spot so that your pup can at least familiarize himself with going in one area if he can’t make it outside. This works particularly well if you don’t have a “doggy door” and your puppy relies on you to let him out.

The sooner you get to know your puppy’s “eat/potty” routine, the easier potty-training will become. The most easy rule to go by is to remember that by the time you’ve fed or watered your pup, he will be ready to potty roughly 15 – 20 minutes later. This rule works very well if you can manage to have your puppy outside the proper potty surroundings at the time you expect he needs relief.

Be sure that you separate “potty time” from “play time.” As it is natural for puppies to want to explore, you should only encourage them at the appropriate times. It can be extremely stressful to wait outside while your puppy plays, only to have an accident as soon as you bring him inside.

This period in your puppy’s life is a great one to start administering praise and discipline techniques. a lot of people prefer the terms “good boy/girl” and “no,” both of which can be still be used when your dog is older. Although puppies need a lot of firmness, repetition, and routine remember that your puppy will soon grow up, so enjoy his puppyhood while you can!

Learn more tips like this at HelpYourPets.com - Puppy Steps and learn how to not only train your puppies but also protect them.

Housetraining

No training is more basic for pet owners than that first important lesson: Do it outside!

Teaching your pet to potty outside the home, not in it, usually starts between six and eight weeks of age. Dogs as young as four weeks have been started on housebreaking, but at that age few have the muscular control to succeed.

With any dog training program, trainer patience is just as important as the dog’s temperament. ‘Sit’, ‘stay’ and other behaviors can often be learned in a few days. House training typically takes weeks – sometimes as short as two, often a month or more.

As with other learned behaviors, it helps to watch for signs of the desired actions and enforce and direct them with a voice command followed by praise. In this case that technique works even more to the trainer’s advantage, since all dogs will naturally eliminate. The trick is to get your puppy to do it when and where you want!

Watch for circling or squatting, then pick up the pup, say ‘outside’ and dash outside. Sometimes, the puppy may circle some more, but will often squat immediately. When he starts, say ‘Go potty’ ( or some other unique phrase) in a clear, firm (but not angry) voice. Wait until she is finished and then her praise lavishly.

You won’t always be able to catch the puppy about to begin, but don’t become angry or impatient when the dog potties indoors. It takes some time for your puppy to learn to tell you it’s time to ‘go outside’. It also takes time for the muscles needed to control bladder and bowels to develop control.

Young dogs need to go every 2-3 hours, on average. If you haven’t spotted pre-elimination behavior within that time, take the dog outside anyway. Issue the command ‘Go potty’ and wait. At first, usually, the dog will have no clue what you want.

Especially, even when outside, it helps to wait and watch for the desired behavior then issue the command. That helps the dog associate the command with the behavior. If tyour puppy hasn’t gone after a couple of minutes and a few ‘Go potty’ commands, take it back inside for an hour. Of course, if you spot the pre-elimination behavior in less time, go outside again immediately.

Dogs have a surprising ability to quickly learn what their ‘alpha’ (the leader of the pack) wants. This is almost always accomplished by associating a verbal command with behavior, followed by praise. Punishment is usually counter-productive, and nowhere more so than in waste elimination training. Never rub a dog’s nose in waste.

Paper and/or crate training is preferred by some. A pup can be trained to eliminate on a newspaper, or on one of the chemically treated pads designed for the purpose. Some small breeds that live all day in the apartment may not need to go outside at all.

The technique has a couple of downsides however. Unlike cats, dogs will seldom go in a perfumed litter box. Newspapers (even with the top layer removed after the dog goes) will eventually leave an unpleasant odor in the house.

Also, long before the odor becomes unattractive to humans, dogs can smell their own distinctive aroma. Dogs don’t find the scent unattractive – quite the opposite. So that spot continues to be the problem.

Dogs that are paper trained sometimes will prefer to potty indoors. Sometimes they’ll miss the paper by just an inch, resulting in a smelly mess to clean up.

Once the odor is in the carpet, the dog will continue to seek that spot out as its proper ‘place to go’. This makes training the dog to eliminate outside even more difficult. Best to suffer a few accidents than to create a hard-to-overcome habit.

Providing patience, praise and consistency are key factors to any dog training. Elimination training is the first order of business for you and your dog.

Get more tips and advice on housetraining or dog training at Luvurdog.com/dogtraining

Dog Training

Dog Training

Though dog-human interaction goes back thousands of years, communication between the two is still sometimes rough. The human half of the pair is usually the smarter party, but watching the usual training sessions one can have legitimate reason to wonder.

Dogs understand and respond at roughly the mental level of a human two-year-old, but there the similarity ends. Their senses operate differently – their color vision has a different response pattern to reds and greens, for example, and obviously their noses are infinitely more sensitive – and their minds process information differently as well. Anyone training dogs has to take this into account in order to avoid human frustration and canine misbehavior.

Dogs are pack animals by nature. Descendant from wolves – where even the ‘lone wolf’ is an anomaly – they’re social and function best with active interplay and within a strict hierarchy.

So, set aside half-an-hour per day, an hour would be better, for at least the first few months of training. You can begin training your dog as soon as possible. Four weeks of age is not too early with some breeds, provided you do not expect too much.

Elimination (‘potty’) training details we leave for elsewhere, but all training follows similar guidelines.

The sooner you establish your dominance, the fewer problems you will have to correct. Dogs have a hierarchy – there are alpha dogs, beta dogs, and on down to the omega. For a sane household, and a well-adjusted dog, the human (whether male or female) must always be the alpha male of the pack.

Depending on the breed, this will be either more difficult or easier. Like humans, some are simply more assertive than others. Collars, leashes, verbal commands and other training aids are usefull with the most important being your attitude. You are the “alpha dog” in your house, not your dog.

That guideline doesn’t imply you must enforce your dominance with physical force. Sometimes, used appropriately, that will be necessary. Usually, simply being firm and willing to wait for compliance will be enough.

For many, placing them on their backs when young and placing a firm hand in the middle of the chest until they lower their paws – a sign of submission – will be enough. With some, reinforcing this by putting your face close to theirs, emulating dominant dog behavior, can help.

Keep the leash short to discourage your dog to run, and pay attention to you. Allow plenty of time for free running behavior, essential to dog health, but that’s before or after training, not during. At least, not at first.

Start simply by choosing short, clear commands that sound distinctly different: sit, stay, down, come. Use a firm voice when addressing your dog. You’re in charge, but not angry. Avoid double-word commands like ‘sit down’ or ‘stay down’. These sound too much alike and quickly confuse the dog.

Accompany each verbal command with the same tone, look and hand gesture. Eventually these can separate, but at first it’s essential to provide the simplest, most consistent form of communication.

Just like two-year old humans, dogs have limited capacity for grasping the subtleties of language. Assist their understanding by rigid consistency. Don’t use a single command word to mean more than one thing. The command ‘Down’ can mean ‘don’t jump on me’, or it can mean ‘lay on your stomach’, but it has to mean one thng only.

Be clear, be patient and be committed and the result will be a dog who trusts and listens to you. And that makes it worth the effort. Find more on dog training at Luvurdog.com/dogtraining