I’m wrapping up the first draft of my book on potty training puppies and older dogs.  The last couple of days, I have been writing the section on housetraining puppies or dogs who will be using an indoor potty, whether just in the cold winter months or year-round.

There are many situations where an indoor dog potty is the best choice: in  very cold weather, in rough neighborhoods,  in tall apartment buildings, if the owner doesn’t get around easily, and more.

So I have been reading around the internet to fill in the gaps of my knowledge, because I have never done this. We have always had fenced yards when we needed to housetrain.

Your comments will be welcome, even if you come across this some time from now.  My book will come out first as a PDF ebook, then after some time it will also be a Kindle book and a paperback. So there will be chances for revision later.

BUT if you have a skimpy little dog training site, or one that advocates painful methods of dog training, and you post a minimal comment here, I will delete it! (I get a lot of these, people just wanting links to their sites.)

Do You Have Any Tips on Housetraining for Indoors? is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

• one on how to housetrain very young puppies,
• and one on how to train older puppies or adult dogs who didn’t get it early on.

The challenges and methods overlap of course but they are different enough that I may go that way.

In any event, it is crucial to the future of any dog that you get them housetrained. Many times, owners who don’t succeed with this give up their dogs to shelters. This is very stressful for the dog, and all too often means they will not live much longer.

The reason the methods are different is that with a young puppy it is a matter of their bodies maturing and of their understanding what you want. Taking them to their potty area every time they wake up is the single most important thing you can do.

But with older puppies and dogs, they have learned some habits that you need to get them to unlearn. Their bodies are almost always capable of holding it, but somehow they haven’t gotten the idea of where to go.  You won’t need to get up in the middle of the night as you may have done with a young puppy, but you will need to be extremely vigilant. Crating the dog may work when you are not home, and tying the dog to your slacks with a long lead is a good way to make sure it doesn’t wander into the living room and use the carpet while you are concentrated on your computer in another room!

Readers, any tips or tales you would like to add would be most welcome.

BUT if you put a link to another website and your comment isn’t really, really good, I will delete it ruthlessly. I get so many comments like “Great post, I learned a lot!” where all the person really wants is a link to their own website. Grrr…

Potty Training Puppies or Older Dogs is Crucial is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

Click on the image to see my review of this excellent ebook on housetraining puppies and dogs:

If you’d like to download the sound file of my discussion, it’s at:

http://www.training-dogs.com/sound-files/housetraining-3qa.mp3

Just right-click on the filename to download it to your computer.

Housetraining: Three Questions and Answers is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

So recently I made a recording based on that page.

You can listen to it here:

Also, here is what I consider to be the best ebook on the subject. Ebooks are nice because you can download them immediately. Click on the image to read my review of it:

If you would like to download this audio to listen to on an mp3 player, for example, here is the direct link to it. Just right-click or the Mac equivalent to save it to your computer.

http://www.training-dogs.com/sound-files/potty-training-dogs.mp3

Potty Training Puppies and Dogs is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

There are already a lot of dog housetraining  pages on the site and there is a whole category you can get to by looking at the long list of categories in the sidebar and picking out Housetraining / Dog Potty Training.

I added the page because I really think dog house training is very important. It always has been, but in these economic times, it is one of the best things you can do for any puppy in your life — or any adult dog, for that matter.

Puppies who go potty on the living room carpet aren’t appreciated much, and it gets worse as the pup becomes a teenager and an adult dog. People sometimes just give up in despair. Next stop for the dog? The local overcrowded dog shelter.

Well, it’s always been the case that dogs that aren’t house trained make up a significant percentage of dogs at shelters, and it’s always been true that dog owners do not usually admit to the shelter staff that they are giving up the dog because of what it does to the floors.

It’s even more important now that you house train any dog that you can because there are so many excellent dogs being given up to shelters due to the difficult economic situations of their owners. At the same time, adoptions must be somewhat down. You can figure out the rest of the story. Sadly.

Why a New Dog House Training Page on This Site? is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

I have often recommended it, and today I got to wondering what else is out there. There are so many more eco-friendly products now in all categories than there were some fifteen years ago.

(Gee, how did so much time pass without my having a puppy to potty train? LarryDog came to us at two years old and Lola around eight months. I didn’t need to clean up after them, but of course we also missed those adorable young-puppy months, sharp teeth, incredibly soft cuddles, and all.  Hmm, maybe the next dog will be a very young one again. But I’m not ready to go there yet. I doubt that’s in the cards while 12-year-old LarryDog is still alive.)

I do get a lot of questions about potty training puppies and dogs, because my page on the topic is one of the most popular on this whole website! There’s also a popular page here in the blog about potty training adult dogs who have bad habits.

So… clean up is a part of the process of housetraining. Often people try using whatever regular household cleansers they may have around. But:

• Regular cleaners are often not safe for dogs to be around.
• They are often not good for the environment, and fortunately we are all seeing more and more that we need to consider this.
• They simply don’t do the job when it comes to getting rid of urine and other odors.

So what are your choices?

I found several things at Amazon, which are shown at the end of this article. You can often get Nature’s Miracle and probably others locally, and  my favorite online  pet supply store SitStay has a good selection, with informative comments. (At Sitstay, scroll down the left menu to Poop/Urine Cleanup, then click on Odor Removers or Stain Removers.)

If you are considering products in a store, where you can read the labels, here are some suggestions:

1. Natural enzymes are in my opinion the best way to go. They are eco-friendly, organic additives that react with stains or odors to get rid of them permanently. Sometimes you may need to re-apply them to get all vestiges of the stains and smells out, so be patient if it takes more than one or two applications.
2. Avoid petroleum-based products as they are not biodegradable, and they can leave toxic residues that can irritate the eyes, lungs, or skin of some dogs… they can even poison dogs OR humans. Instead, look for cleaners with plant-based ingredients such as corn, lemon, orange, or coconut.
3. Watch for products labeled “Non-toxic.”  This means not poisonous and it’s important because many dogs lick or eat just about anything around them. Some young children do, too. You want to clean with something that isn’t going to cause problems for any of the precious ones in your family, or for the larger environment.
4. A real plus when you can find it is recyclable packaging. A lot of these cleansers will be liquid, so you are not so likely to find biodegradable boxes. And if you do find recyclable packaging, do recycle it when you’ve used the cleanser all up!

Maybe by that time, your dog will be housetrained. These cleansers are also good for other smelly messes that dogs can create. Many of them work with cat odors too, while some companies make separate products formulated specifically for dogs or cats.

Here are some I found at Amazon:

They carry a variety of Natures Miracle products, including one for getting out the odor of skunks! I bet it beats that old standby, tomato juice.

Urine Off Stain & Odor Remover for Dogs & Puppies (16.9-fl oz. (500-ml) spray bottle):

32 oz. Get Serious!

They come in various sizes, but I’m just trying to show you a sample, not the whole list. Clicking through on any of them makes it easy to see the whole product lines.

Environmentally Friendly Pet Stain Cleaners is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

UPDATE May 2009: Over 67,000 people have seen it now!

I also have put it on a variety of lesser-known video websites. Here it is from a site I like called 5min.com, which only has how-to videos:

On the video screen, one of the little icons on the lower left says Links. If you click on that, you will see a link to my potty training page on this website and to an excellent article, “Errorless Housetraining” by Ian Dunbar.

Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much time on potty training / housetraining / housebreaking puppies, but it’s sad how many people never quite get their dogs properly trained, so this is one way I feel I can help dogs! Many inadequately housetrained puppies end up being given away or worse. If you have a blog or website related to dogs in any way, you are very welcome to embed the code from Youtube or 5min.com in your site.

Potty Train Your Puppy Video is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

In a nutshell, Dr. Dunbar makes house training sound so easy. Most of his advice is quite like that on my own potty training dogs page, but there are some (brilliant) variations and explanations. He points out that puppy house training is very much about timing and describes a 1-2-3 process for doing it. He talks about how and where to confine the puppy while he is learning, and outlines an approach to expanding the area the pup can be free in as he gains control. Since one very good way to confine the puppy is via crate training, he talks about that too. The article recommends a particular reward when the puppy does its stuff — and that was one place where I said “Brilliant!” again.

Something that I hadn’t thought about much is the rate of speed to get a puppy outside when you are taking him out as part of his house training routine. Sure, if he was seeming ready to do something on the carpet, I would advocate getting him outside rapidly! But Dr. Dunbar makes a really good point: he says to regularly run quickly with your puppy to the area you want him to use, because if you dawdle around, he may urinate or defecate before getting to your chosen destination. He adds that the rapid movement will be shaking the puppy’s internal organs, making your pet more ready to do his stuff immediately when you stop. Now, if you can’t really run for whatever reason, just hustle along at the best rate of speed you can manage! Pretty soon you will have a house trained dog, and then you can slow down.

In case you haven’t come across his name before… veterinarian, researcher and long-time dog training teacher Ian Dunbar has done a tremendous amount to bring dog training to a new level. His dedication to positive dog training has had ramifications that have spread all over the planet, radically changing the ongoing dialogue about the best methods to train a dog.

Dunbar’s DVD, Sirius Puppy Training, is one of my favorites — that link takes you to my page about the program. I still remember the first time that someone bought the program at Dogwise through my link. It was the very first thing I ever sold from this site, and I burst into tears — because I had helped a puppy have a better start in life. I would never meet the puppy or know anything about it… but my webpage had created a connection. That was one of the defining moments for me in my ongoing dedication to working on this website. Not to sound mushy, but it’s true!

Errorless Housetraining is adapted from Dr. Dunbar’s useful, short paperback, Before You Get Your Puppy… this link takes you to its page at Dogwise, and the box links to it at Amazon:

Before You Get Your Puppy by Ian DunbarRead more about this book…

In summary, if we could all house train our puppies with the clarity of mind and humor that this article brings to the subject, that would be very nice indeed!

UPDATE: After I wrote this article but before I published it to the internet, I was delighted to discover that this entire little book is available online as a free PDF download! I will do a whole blog article about this later, but you can go ahead and get Before You Get Your Puppy, by Ian Dunbar, here at no cost.

[tags]house training puppies, housetraining[/tags]

Puppy House Training Without Errors is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

One more point before we get into the process: your puppy’s body will mature at its own rate, and different breeds tend to mature at different times. Nobody would expect a human baby to be potty trained in its earliest months, and it’s the same with your new friend. I had one puppy, an Australian Shepherd, who never once did his business in our house from the day we got him at eight weeks, but that is very rare. All my other puppies took a lot longer to be full housebroken.

Okay, so the name of the game with house training your puppy is to know when he is most likely to need to go potty and to be sure and take him outside then. When is that?

• Anytime he wakes up, be it after a nap or early (often VERY early) in the morning.
• After he has eaten, within just a few minutes.

So watch him like a hawk at those times and go right outside — or at least, be ready to scoop him up or coax him to run outside with you.

Also, plan on taking him out just before you go to bed. This gives you the best chance of a good night’s sleep! It’s your call whether you get up in the middle of the night to take him out or not. I do, because it does seem to make the potty training process go faster if my puppy doesn’t go in his crate in the wee hours, or should I say wee-wee hours?

Once you get outside, it may take a while. Be patient. Do some exercises or pull a few weeds, so long as your attention is on your dog and you see when he does go potty. By the way, if you want him to use a particular part of the yard, go there. If you don’t have a yard and are walking him on leash in your neighborhood, choose some good places and keep your pup off your neighbor’s prize petunias! I wear a small fanny pack with plastic produce bags from the grocery store for collecting any poop.

Once your puppy pees and maybe poops, praise him warmly. Play a little more before going inside so he doesn’t associate doing his business with having to stop having fun in the yard.

What if you live in an extreme climate or in an apartment where you can’t just run out the door? Or a place that isn’t all that safe? Paper training is another method that can be used in potty training a puppy. I haven’t ever used this method, as I have always had yards when I started my various puppies, but it’s quite useful in many circumstances. For small dogs, there are even devices that you could graduate to where they would do their business most of the time indoors. If you do go that route, just be sure to train them to use the great out of doors as well, in case you are on a car trip or something of the sort!

What about when your puppy does make a mistake in the house? Just quietly clean it up in a matter-of-fact manner. Just about any pet supply store will have enzyme cleaners — there are numerous brands — that will cut the odor and thus reduce the change of the puppy picking the same spot over and over. Do not scold your puppy, as he really won’t understand. But if you happen to catch him in the act, firmly say NO! and take him outside.

Well, in a nutshell, that’s all there is to it. I’ve written about this topic in other articles, most notably at my page on potty training dogs, which is pretty much the most popular page I’ve written on this site! But it’s such an important topic for the for the future well-being of your new little friend, that I’ll probably keep writing now and then about potty training a puppy. Adult dogs really need to be potty trained, housebroken, or housetrained — whatever you want to call it!– to have a good life. So be patient and keep at it.

For more detailed information and lots of great tips on potty training a puppy, I really like a downloadable ebook by Martin “Scoop” Olliver which spells out how to choose whether to use the direct method where you take the puppy outside for his training or to use the paper training approach. Then there is a step-by-section for either approach. So whether you are house training a puppy indoors or out, you can just print out the pertinent pages of the ebook if you want to. His website explains about using ebooks, if you haven’t done that before. To see what others say about his guide to potty training a puppy or adult dog, just click on the image:

Technorati Tags: potty training a puppy

Potty Training a Puppy is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

Oops, it’s actually called “Potty Training Puppies” on the video itself. Well, you get the general idea! While I’m updating, I’ll say that this video has been viewed almost 3,000 times in the 10 weeks it’s been up. That’s a lot of people with puppies!

[tags]potty training puppy, puppy training[/tags]

Potty Train Your Puppy is a post from: Training Dogs Blog