Recently I added a page to this blog… It’s Dog House Training, and you can get to it from that link of course but also, it is now one of the tabs at the top of every page.

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.

How do you clean up pet stains and smells? The last time we had a puppy to house train, we also had a house with wall to wall carpets. At that point, I discovered Nature’s Miracle, a very effective and non-toxic product which removes both stains and odors. Our carpets got a lot of it, as our young Basenji puppy saw no reason to go out in the rain to do her business. I liked this stuff, fortunately, because  Sunbeam was the most challenging puppy to potty train that we have ever had. Nature’s Miracle removes odors and stains because the enzymes it contains somehow gobble them up. You can use it on furniture, clothing, crates, pretty much anywhere you need it.

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. Read the rest of this entry

When I decided to experiment with making online videos last December, I made one called Potty Train Your Puppy. It’s under 4 minutes and goes through the basics of housetraining puppies. Recently I checked my stats for Potty Train Your Puppy at Youtube and was thrilled that over 12,000 people had watched it. (The link takes you to the video at youtube.)

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.

I’ve just been reading an article about house training puppies called Errorless Housetraining by Dr. Ian Dunbar. I kept saying “Brilliant!” and “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” all the way through it. Want to read it yourself? The link will open in a new browser window.

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]