You’re staring at the new bundle of fluff you’ve recently brought home, who has managed to destroy your living room, mangle your sofa’s leg, and make a big puddle on the carpet, all in the fifteen minutes that you weren’t paying attention to him in. And you wonder to yourself, ‘well, I could have used three movies on how to train him, for sure.’
Which naturally seems like a massive undertaking. Having to house train a puppy who does not have the vaguest idea of the concept of obedience, feels like a personal Everest to beginners. Especially when it’s simultaneously hard to look into their trusting little faces and teach them to ignore the wonders of everything around them, and focus on rules. You don’t want that kind of severity for your fluffy baby. Except… you do.
Statistics show that dogs who have been trained and socialized live significantly happier lives, than dogs who have been allowed to run amok. The reasons behind this are multiple, from being more accepting of strangers (aka, more people and more pats), to benefitting from more structure in their lives.
The latter contributes not only to your dog’s living schedule, but also to the likelihood that he develops anxiety, distress, separation anxiety, obesity, panic disorders, and many more behavioral tendencies that are directly linked to lesser training and discipline in dogs.
Before you can get to how to train your puppy fancy tricks, you should have a basic command down to pat: the clicker. A clicker is a small device that, well, clicks. Every time you click it, give your dog a tiny treat.
So! If you’re looking for ways to improve your dog’s quality of life and/or save your furniture, look no fur-ther.
#1 Pup-Pee Problems
The biggest problem with training puppies is always: how do you house train a puppy to pee outside? Puppies have the bladder sensitivity and spatial orientation of, well, a puppy. But as insurmountable as the problem initially seems, when confronted with the puddles everywhere, it’s actually very manageable.
The solution is a two pronged approach: short term and long term training. The first thing you need to show your puppy is where he needs to go. Then you can start working on managing the when.
For starters, your puppy needs to be older than 12 weeks to be house broken at all. Before this age, puppies do not have bowel or bladder control. So, training before 12 weeks is not going to have any results.
Additionally, your puppy’s earlier life plays a role in it, too. If your pupper has been in a cage or enclosure for the first 12 weeks of his life, he has very likely been ‘going’ whenever he wanted in the cage.
This desensitises dogs to recognizing bowel movements as something that should be done ‘elsewhere’. Which also means, that these dogs require a little extra training to understand the concept of going to the loo in specific areas.
The first tool in your arsenal is the ‘where’. For this, you have to show your pupper than he needs to go pee in a specific area. Recognise the signs. If your puppy is whining, sniffing the ground frantically, circling in the same spot, or beginning to squat, he needs to ‘go’. This is where puppy training pads can be particularly useful for training a puppy where to pee.
When he displays this behavior, take him out immediately. If you cannot, you can put him on a puppy mat or laid out newspapers instead. The goal is that your puppy needs to learn the association between peeing and the specific place.
To train a puppy to pee outside, it is important to put your pupper on a steady feeding and walk schedule. Taking your puppy out for walks early in the morning and before sleeping will minim