Housebreaking a puppy

Housebreaking a puppy starts as soon as you bring them home. But what do you focus on? Most of our clients get things started by picking up a puppy gate and a few toys to occupy the new puppy and keep him out of trouble. From there it’s full on take the puppy outside time. I have clients taking their puppy outside every hour or at time every half hour. This is all in an effort to housebreak their puppy. The problem is that when you’re doing this without any thought to all the other things that go into housebreaking you become ineffective.

Just taking your puppy outside is not enough. You need to also work on feeding the right kind of foods. The food you feed can contain extra bulk or fillers that make housebreaking difficult because your puppy can't handle the extra volume. Making sure your puppy is getting water at the right time is also another large factor. Too much water and your puppy can't hold his bladder. Too little and your puppy will try and drink as much as he can every time you offer it to him and then have problems controlling his bladder over a long period of time. Then there's scheduling all of this so that it works in your puppy's favor. It's a lot to think about!

But wait there’s more! Sorry couldn’t resist. There is one thing that many people who have called us and wanted to housebreak their puppies have had in common. They don’t understand the role of discipline in housebreaking. You see I have people call and ask we offer housebreaking as a separate program. They will tell my well my puppy is pretty well behaved so I don’t need any regular training I just need her to stop going to the bathroom in the house. So is their puppy really just in need of housebreaking or are we missing something?

If you were to do everything exactly the way we need you to during your program but you never learned to enforce proper discipline, why would your puppy stop going to the bathroom in the house? What would be her motivation? You see if you don’t learn how to enforce discipline your puppy will eventually realize that he truly is in control. He CAN go to the bathroom whenever and wherever he wants because you can’t do anything to stop him.

So why is all of this so complicated? To put it simply it’s completely against a dog’s nature to be housebroken. I know that most so called experts say things like “A dog will always keep his personal area clean” and “Dogs won’t go to the bathroom where they sleep” well like all things in life these are not hard and fast rules. In an adult dogs mind 10 feet away from its stool may be enough. For a puppy 2 feet might be just fine. As for not going where they sleep I get calls all the time from people with puppies that will lie in urine and stool because they have not had all of the above principles taught to them in unison. You see in the wild a dog can just walk to a spot he feels comfortable with and use the bathroom there. In a home it’s a whole different ball game.

All of the things we talked about work in unison to help housebreak your puppy. Once you put all the pieces together you will have a wonderfully trained puppy that is a joy to be around.

Puppy Obedience Training in Tampa, Orlando, and Sarasota.