One of the best approaches to house breaking is to use a crate. This is one of the fastest and easiest methods. The first step in this approach is to purchase a crate that is big enough for your dog. You want to obtain one that permits your dog to stand up and turn around, but not much more.

People frequently buy a crate knowing that their puppy will grow into it. This is fine, but while the puppy is young and you are house training, you should make the crate smaller. The idea of crate training is to create a den impression upon the puppy.

You want the dog to view the crate as his den or bed. Dogs are generally clean animals and will avoid soiling in their beds. However, if your puppy is small and there is too much room in his crate, he may start using one end as a bathroom area.

No matter what you are trying to accomplish with your training, you should remember that positive techniques are faster and more effective than either corrections or negative reinforcement methods. Another part of training is to use a pleasant tone. Dogs are sensitive to emotions and tones. They may not know why you are mad, but they will understand the sharp or stern delivery.

Consistency is vital to any kind of training. It is up to you as a pet owner to be consistent with your puppy. Part of knowing how to house train a dog fast involves having a strict routine for the puppy. This includes his bathroom times and feeding times. When you get up in the morning, you are going to have to let your new friend out to pee. No, do not wait to have a cup of coffee, take him out.

In the evening, take him outside to his bathroom area as close to bedtime as possible. Puppies do not have the ability to wait for more than a few hours at a time. You may for the first few days have to get up and let him out during the night to prevent accidents.

Puppies will need to go to the bathroom within a couple of minutes of either eating or drinking. After you have fed the puppy, you need to be ready to go outside. Each and every time you go out with the puppy, you should take small treats with you. If your puppy does use the bathroom area, be certain to cheer and offer a reward. This is an effective positive method. Furthermore, when you are simply out walking every time that the dog does pee, you should offer a reward.

While you are employing this method, you might want to add in a verbal command. Every time that the dog does go to the bathroom in the right area, praise and give the command word. You might want to train the dog to go to the bathroom using the command word “pee” or “get going”. Each time he goes, tell your puppy “good pee” or clap and say “pee”.

A correction is only going to be effective if you catch the puppy while in the act. A simple sharp no, is a sufficient correction. You should never hit a dog for any reason. If you do see him peeing, quickly snatch him up, and take him immediately to his bathroom area. However, if all you find is the mess, you are too late. You may be mad, but there is no point in trying to correct the dog. Clean-up and move on.

The keys to how to house train a dog fast are consistency and positive reinforcement. A crate will also speed up the process, and reduce the number of accidents.

How to House Train a Dog Fast is a post from: Training A Dog

Nothing is wrong with making an emotional decision because your puppy will bring you tons of fun and love, but please be prepared to train your doggy. A trained dog is a happy dog. Learn how to make training your puppy a fun activity.

This article will teach you how to toilet train your new puppy.

A cleaner way to live with a dog.

So, you ask, “How do I toilet train my puppy?” Well, you do this with love, care, patience and plenty of treats. One thing that keeps many people away from dog ownership is the mess that dogs make. Unlike cats, dogs do not use nice smelling kitty litter boxes to dispose of their waster.

Instead, dog owners often wake up or return home to find that their furry best friend has used their carpet or even their sofa as a place to make a mess. This alone is enough to make most people regret every bringing a dog into their lives. The remedy for this is potty training your puppy.

Step one to toilet training your puppy

The number one thing you must do to toilet train your puppy is CONSISTENCY. You must feed your puppy at the same time of day, and in the same area of your house. You must take your puppy out the house to potty at the same time of day.

Consistently teach your dog these things so that he understand his schedule. Take him outside to potty first thing in the morning, and after each meal.

Establish an area where your dog is allowed to potty. There are several products on the market that are designed to be a toilet for dogs. You can use these type of products instead of paper.

Whenever your dog potties anywhere other than the established place, you must firmly correct his or her behavior. In a firm voice, say NO, and lead the dog to the proper place to potty. Be firm at the location where he has made a mess, and use a friendlier voice when you show him the right place to potty.

You do this to associate the accepted place to potty with a happy owner and praise. How do I toilet train my puppy — with patience and hard work.

Also, crate training you dog is a good way to control when he potties, and this also plays into the consistency that we talked about earlier. Some owners think that crating is like sending your dog to prison, but it is not.

In the wild, dogs live in small dens, and dogs naturally like small areas that they can call their own. Crating prevents any overnight accidents that can occur from having a free roaming dog.

A dog will never potty where he sleeps, so you can easily take your dog out in the morning to go potty.

How do I toilet train my puppy? You potty train your puppy by establishing a consistent schedule and set of rules for your dog. You schedule when and where he is allowed to potty, and you use corrective language to encourage him to do the right thing.

How Do I Toilet Train My Puppy? is a post from: Training A Dog

Puppy housebreaking method is said to be matter of preference and to certain extent it may be the case.

However, as many unfortunate dog owners with impaired mobility or puppy owners who live in high rise building in downtown will point out sometimes there is no choice but to opt in for so called indoor puppy housebreaking.

Fortunately, house training a puppy in apartment-thanks to some great tools that we have at our disposal-could be done at least as simple as outdoor puppy housebreaking method.

There are few things that work in our favor:

Inborn Instinct To Seek Out A Den

Puppies have inborn instinct to seek out and to take care of their den. This alone is great help when creating the plan for house training a puppy in an apartment.

Armed with this knowledge we should help our new puppy to find his den. That’s right. How about nice create?

When choosing right create we should pay attention not to buy too large create or our puppy could decide to use one side as a toilet.

To avoid this (if our crate is large) we should block off one side and leave only enough space for our puppy to stand up and turn around.

Puppy Potty Schedule

Puppy potty schedule is very important part of our overall puppy housebreaking plan.

Knowing our puppy schedule or scheduling potty breaks for our lovely puppy will help to predict when our puppy will need to eliminate.

And this is will be great help for we now have opportunity to match the behavior with positive experience.

By now we should have our verbal cue ready (go potty, do your business or something that makes sense to you).

The idea is simple! We know that our puppy needs to eliminate and therefore we will use our verbal cue to match with the behavior.

If repeated enough our puppy with associate the cue with the behavior and in the future when we say the cue he will eliminate. And when he does we should reinforce it with some kind of reward…be it yummy treat or toy or just a praise. It has been found out that dog is more willing to repeat or to offer behavior that he gets reward for. It is called operant conditioning.

Choosing The Potty Spot

To make it easier for our puppy and for ourselves as well we should dedicate potty area in our apartment and should always take our puppy to this area and apply above “housebreaking tricks” to get our puppy to eliminate and than to reinforce it.

In order to keep this area clean we could use some tools such as news paper, litter boxes and/or indoor pet potty pads such as PetZoomPetPark as well as proper cleaners.

Stay Consistent And Patient

The consistence and patience are two last peaces of the puzzle that we will need to master the art of house training a puppy in a apartment.

Dogs learn through repetition and therefore we should give them some time to build the association between the behavior and its consequence. Remember the old say: “The Rome wasn’t built in a day!”

Indoor Puppy Housebreaking: The Best Puppy Housebreaking Method? is a post from: Training A Dog

While there are many different approaches how to teach our puppy, not only puppy housebreaking but anything else,  the best results are achieved if our training is reward based type of training.

The idea is simple-we want to pair the behavior with reward and in turn our puppy will offer that behavior more often (or when asked to).

Those familiar with basic dog obedience training will know that we can wait for puppy to do something (the behavior) and than reinforce that behavior or we can speed up this process by getting our puppy to do certain activity/behavior and than reinforce it by reward.

One example would be “cheating” puppy into “sit” position” and than reinforcing it.

While this method works great for basic obedience-puppy housebreaking, for obvious reasons, will require slightly different approach. However, there is no reason for panic just yet. If you remember if we want to be successful with puppy housebreaking we should have good  plan in place for potty training a puppy in apartment and one of most important part of this plan is the schedule. Having schedule in place will help us “predict’ when our puppy will need to eliminate.

Puppy Housebreaking-How To Teach Our Puppy To Ring A Potty Bell

In addition our puppy will give us clear signals (body language) when he needs to go out. Unfortunately, a lot of times we fail to read those signals which than can lead to accidents.

One great way to avoid this is to teach our puppy to give us loud and clear signal that he wants to go out. When we said “loud” we meant “loud as a bell” )

That’s right we are talking about teaching our puppy to ring a bell! It is much simpler than it may appear to be. Remember the Pavlov’s Conditioning Experiment? Here is simple way to teach our puppy (or adult dog) how to ring a bell:

1. First we need to know our puppy body language when he needs to go out. When we know this we will prompt our puppy to go out (Any verbal cue we are comfortable with).
2. We will need some bell that will be used as a market. Usually the best place to put this bell would be the exit door (but make sure it is at right height so that our puppy can reach it).
3. Whenever we take our puppy outside for potty break we would ring a bell (this way our puppy will build association between ringing the bell and potty break). We shouldn’t be ringing the bell if we take puppy for the walk but only if we take puppy out for potty break.
4. We should encourage our puppy to try it and praise our puppy as he getting closer to bell or sniffs it.
5. When we get outside we should encourage our puppy to eliminate and when he does it is important to use the verbal cue as well.
6. Eventually our puppy will start touching the bell either with his paw or maybe his nose. When that happens we should reward our puppy greatly. Usually after few repetition our puppy establishes strong connection between ringing the bell and the potty break and will start using it. On our part we should keep reinforcing this behavior and our effort puppy housebreaking training efforts will soon pay off.

Puppy Housebreaking Tricks is a post from: Training A Dog

If so, congratulations!

Now you can decide to keep it up or maybe to bring it to the next level. That’s right! It is possible to bring our puppy training efforts to the next level.

Interested?

Great! Thanks to the research it is now possible for regular people to talk about “shaping behavior”.

Puppy Housebreaking Training And Shaping Behavior

Now without pretending to be able to read your mind it is pretty safe to assume that you have at least two questions. First being: “What the heck is shaping behavior.:” and the second “What does it have to do with our puppy housebreaking training?”.

Simply put shaping behavior is method of gradually teaching (our puppy) new behavior by using the reinforcement(s). When it comes to teaching puppy new behavior the food treat/toys or praise could be used as reinforcement.

It is important to timely deliver the reinforcement so that our puppy knows what action has earned him that reward.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this post puppy housebreaking training indeed could be very rewarding. All that time spent teaching you puppy have finally paid off and your puppy listens to you. You say your verbal cue and your puppy pees.

Amazing, isn’t it. But we want you now to imagine how would it be if your puppy would be able to tell you when he wants to go out to do his business. Truth of the matter is that if we pay close attention to his body language we will noticed that he is trying to tell us that he needs to go.

But this is not what we are talking about here. We asking you to imagine how nice it would be if your puppy “tells” you clearly that he wants to go out. Yes, many puppy already to just that and your puppy can do the same-assuming you are willing to teach him how to do that.

Shaping behavior is even more fun than the basic puppy housebreaking training. One of the well known way to teach your puppy to tell you that he needs to go out is to teach your puppy to ring a bell and this is what we will talk in our next post.

Advanced Puppy Housebreaking Methods: For Those Who Want Perfect Puppy is a post from: Training A Dog

Now, why in the world than my puppy doesn’t seem to get this puppy housebreaking thing-you may be asking?

Well, how about …maybe it is not his fault after all. Let’s for the moment explore this possibility, shall we? In one of our earlier posts we said that we should start our puppy housebreaking efforts by creating good puppy or adult dog housebreaking plan. Very important part of that plan was to stay consistent throughout the puppy training.

Unfortunately, most of the time what happens is that while we stay consistent in our approach to puppy housebreaking some of our household members has different approach. If our puppy gets different directions over and over again it is no wonder the “he doesn’t get it”. While it may not be apparent but getting all household members to be on the same page is extremely important. It is understandable that primary caregiver needs a break and other household members need to help out but they must use the same method as we do therefore this method must be well known to all household members involved in puppy housebreaking.

Having the right puppy housebreaking plan in place and sticking to this plan will show great result. It may sound simple but getting all adults (and kids if they participate in puppy housebreaking) on the same page seems to be one of the greatest obstacles to successful puppy or for that matter adult dog housebreaking. If we manage to get all household members on the same page than we will have completed probably the hardest part of puppy housebreaking

Puppy Housebreaking Secrets-My Puppy Doesn’t Get It? is a post from: Training A Dog

While everybody likes having a puppy/dog many still find picking up puppy/dog poop to be gross. So, what can be done.? Do we have to return our adorable puppy to shelter house? Luckily

no. There is much simpler solution to this. It is called pooper scooper.

Flexrake 33P Jaws Pooper Scooper
is device that has been invented by Ms. Brooke Miller. It usually consist of rake like device (attached to wooden stick) that scoops poop into the scooper.

Nowadays we can find more different products and below you will find a picture of Flexrake 33P Jaws Pooper Scooper which is very popular on Amazon ( Ranked # 416 in Home & Garden) with a lot of positive comments with average rating of 4.5 stars as of time of this writing.

Here are some of Flexrake 33P Jaws Pooper Scooper features:

• Jaws pooper scooper
• Cleaning up after your dog is faster and easier
• Designed for easy, one-handed pick-ups on all surfaces
• Powerful spring action ensures the jaws stay closed until you’re ready to empty it
• Long handle eliminates unnecessary bending
• The item weights only 1 pound and can be shipped

Hopefully pooper scooper will help many dog owners who couldn’t stand the idea to pick up puppy’s poop by (bagged) hand. Now they do not have to anymore. Due to long handle the Flexrake 33P Jaws Pooper Scooper eliminates unnecessary bending and this will be appreciated by many.

Flexrake 33P Jaws Pooper Scooper

Discover Why Is Flexrake 33P Jaws Pooper Scooper Loved By Dog Owners is a post from: Training A Dog

However, just because we opted for outdoor puppy housebreaking method doesn’t make the issue go away. In our last post we mentioned that leaving our puppy’s poop all over the place is not only unethical but also illegal and most cities have some laws in place to regulate this. In this post we want to highlight some other areas of concerns.

Many dog owners sooner or later will notice that their lawn is dying (the owners of female dog maybe even more so) even though they always pick up dog’s poop. While the cleaning up methods that we introduced in our last post do indeed excellent job when it comes to removing the poop unfortunately it doesn’t help us to protect the grass from the damages caused by our dog’s urine.

Outdoor Puppy Housebreaking-How To Protect The  Grass?

1. The simplest method would be to keep our puppy away from the lawn but so many times this doesn’t work and the grass gets damaged.
2. One of the good ways to protect the grass from dying is to flash it with plenty of water. This will help by diluting the Nitrogen in our dog’s urine.
3. Some believe that given our dog plenty of water will also dilute the urine and therefore have much less impact on our lawn.
4. Lastly some people opt for grass that is more resistant to urine damages.

Outdoor Puppy Housebreaking And The Risk To Our Lawn is a post from: Training A Dog

I am sorry to disappoint those who meant that outdoor dog housebreaking method means no clean up but nothing is further from the truth. Leaving our dog’s poop all over the place is not only unethical but also illegal. Yes, most of cities have enacted some laws to regulate the clean up and yes-there is heavy price to pay if we fail to do so.

We need to remember that dog feces are one of the leading cause of E.-colli pollution. It can contaminate soil and the water as well. And finally should we fail to clean up after our doggy in most cases we might face very hefty fines. Here are few methods how we can take care of our dog’s poop if we opt for outdoor housebreaking method.

Using the bag in outdoor dog housebreaking method.

Using the bag to get rid of our dog’s poop even though considered by many to be gross is still one of the quickest ways and is very often seen if outdoor dog housebreaking method is used . To avoid accident we should inspect the bag for any holes.

When it comes to technique itself it is rather easy and consist just of few steps:

• We should cover one hand with the bag just as if we pulling the gloves
• With our bagged hand we pick up the poop and
• With our free hand we pull the open ends (inside-out) so that poop will end up inside the bag
• Now we only need to knot the bag and put it into proper disposal area or flash the content down the toilet.

Using Pooper-Scooper in outdoor dog housebreaking method.

Pooper-Scooper is a device invented by Brooke Miller that is used to pick up animal feces from public areas and/or yards. It looks similar to shovel with rake-like device that scoops the poop into the scooper and usually has a bag attached to it. See the picture bellow.

Outdoor Dog Housebreaking Clean Up Methods is a post from: Training A Dog

It might take some time for this to take place but boy ..you will be surprised how much of the difference it makes.

Puppy Housebreaking Verbal Cues

When it comes to choosing the right verbal cue ..it really doesn’t matter as long as you stay consistent and use the same verbal cue all the time. The system is

rather very simple. When you want to take your puppy outside you say your verbal cue and when you get outside to your puppy’s favorite spot and when your puppy is doing his potty business outside you say the verbal cue and do not forget to praise him when he is done.

You also could give small treat or play with him so that positive experience is associated with the activity.
Over the time it will be enough if you get your puppy outside to his favorite spot and say the puppy housebreaking verbal cue and your puppy will start eliminating rightaway.

You should have two different verbal cues during your puppy housebreaking training.

One for going outside and one for eliminating. It is important ones again to remind ourselves that this learning process might take some time and it is important that we remain calm and patient with our puppy.

Most importantly we should not scold and scare our puppy if there is an accident during puppy housebreaking training.

Puppy Housebreaking Training And Submissive Urination

We should be aware that some puppies might do what is referred to as submissive urination when they are scared or too excited. They do not have control over it and we should stay calm if this happens. The best way as we already mentioned for similar accidents is just to clean it and forget. Good thing is that most of the puppies will outgrow this by the age of 6 month (up to 1 year).

Discover How You Can Potty Train Your Puppy In 7 Days or Less!

Puppy Housebreaking-The Power Of The Verbal Cues is a post from: Training A Dog