How To Toilet Train Your Puppy
Toilet training your puppy or untrained adult dog doesn’t have to be a nightmare or a chore.
With this article, you’ll learn tips on how to toilet train your dog, which will help you teach your dog to go toilet in the correct place, on command, and not in your house.
1. Supervise and Manage Your Dog correctly
This includes crate training your dog, playpen training, tie outs and place training, but let’s start with crate training and playpen training. When done correctly, your dog should view their crate and their puppy playpen positively. “What is crate training” you ask? Crate training your dog, means they’re comfortable in an enclosed dog kennel which leads to, minimized puppy toilet training accidents, less stressful veterinarian visits, dog grooming visits and travel to dog friendly adventures with you.
Check out this link to learn the crate training tips you should know and the best puppy crate training schedule.
2. Create a Puppy Toilet Training Schedule
No matter what your dog’s habits or current toilet training schedule, you’ll need to also understand your dog’s body language and eating / water drinking habits. To start understanding your dog’s body language and behaviour, grab this free PDF toilet training tracker.
3. Leash Your Dog
When your dog is on leash during your dogs toilet training, they’re much less likely to become distracted and forget to go potty. Don’t laugh; puppies (and even untrained adult dogs) really do that!
4. Reward Your Puppy For Toileting In The Correct Place
When you start potty training your puppy or adult dog, you’ll want to know the best potty training rewards. I tend to use “Ziwi Peak” or Pime-100 fresh rolls, in training, as they are both healthy options for training treats for dogs. Before you get to this stage you need to have conditioned markers in place.
When you take your dog out to their designated “toilet zone” wait for them to successfully toilet and as they are finishing up, use their “release cue” to signal to your dog that they’ve done the correct behaviour and give them a high value reward (food treat).
5. When to use dog training commands
Make sure you’re only “naming” the behaviour (saying your dog’s command) when you’re happy with how your dog is “going potty” i.e the location. If you’re still waiting 10 to 15 minutes for your dog to toilet, they’re not ready for you to start giving their command to “go potty”.
With these toilet training tips in your dog training tool belt, you’ll know the best methods of how to toilet train your dog and how to avoid common puppy training and dog training pitfalls.
Struggling to Toilet Train Your Puppy or Adopted Adult Dog?
If You’re struggling with when to start toilet training your puppy or setting up your puppies toilet training routine, contact us to learn how we can help.