Learn how to train your dog to do his business outside without causing any trauma or inconvenience. All puppies are adorable and we find them adorable. It is a moment of great joy to adopt our little pet. It will bring us great satisfaction, but adopting it also entails great responsibility.
In order for our new family member to be a perfect dog, we need to give him the best education possible. It will be up to us to make the dog as adorable as possible, both with others and in our home.
The first thing we should teach our dog when it comes home is to do its business in the right place, and then later on, we can teach it to do it outside. This is a very important task, not only for us but also for the animal. Dogs do not like to sleep in the same place where they pee or defecate, so the sooner they learn to do it outside the house, the happier our pets will be.
Dog Development: At What Age Should Your Dog Learn to Control Its Needs?
Every normal puppy will be with its mother for at least the first 8 weeks of life. After this period, the mother may leave the puppies aside and help them to be more independent, since their sense of smell, hearing, and sight are already developed, in that order.
If we are the breeders of the puppies, we can teach them to pee in a specific place from birth, for example on a newspaper or special diapers for puppies that are placed on the floor.
If we always place these supports in the same place and teach the puppies to get used to it from the beginning of their life, it will be much easier for them to associate peeing in a specific place and not in any other place in the room or space they are in. If we are not lucky enough that the breeder taught our puppy to do its business from the beginning of its life, it is our job to do it at the same time we acquire our pet.
Normally, we can adopt a puppy from 2 or 3 months old depending on when the owner wants to separate it from its mother. But we can also adopt them when they are older. However, age is not an excuse to teach our dog where to do its business. These animals are incredibly intelligent and, if we do it properly, they will learn to do their business outside the house sooner than we imagine.
Newspaper or special diapers can be our best allies in the first months
Before six months of age, it is understandable that our puppy may have an accident, since when they are small they have to do their business more often and do not yet have specific control of their sphincter.
How to train your dog: to know when to do his business
Image Credit: https://khpet.com/blogs/dogs/how-late-is-too-late-to-train-an-older-dog
From the moment the dog arrives at our home, we must dedicate a specific place in the house where he can do his business.
When your dog is young, he should pee more frequently than when he is an adult. If he has already had all his vaccinations, he may not yet be able to control his needs and will pee anywhere in the house before it is time to go outside.
That is why it is very important that when we see him doing his business at home, only at the moment he is doing it, we say a short and imperative phrase like ‘no’ that he will associate with him doing something wrong. We can also pick him up and take him to the diaper or newspaper that we have on the floor so that he associates the act of peeing with doing it in this specific place.
If your dog continues to do his business on the paper, we need to praise him with comforting words and a sweet and friendly tone of voice, so that he can associate it with doing something right. This is a great incentive since what dogs love most is making their owners happy, so our sweet words and caresses are the best reward.
While he is doing his business at home, and when he is a puppy, we must pay as much attention as possible to our dog. Not only so that he cannot hurt himself or break something, but also because we must ensure that he does not do his business outside the designated place.
If we scold him at the moment when he is peeing outside the diaper or newspaper, the teaching is much more effective than if we do it after he has done it.
It is very important that your puppy always has free access to the area where he does his business when he is learning. Once he knows how to control his sphincter and always go to the bathroom in the same place (and when he has all the necessary vaccinations to be able to go outside) it will be time to teach him to do it outside the house.
This won’t be easy either. The first day we take him out for a walk he may sniff, or even eat, everything he finds on the way or he may not want to walk. When we know how to walk him on a leash in the street, it’s time to teach him to do his business outside the house. The smell of other dogs’ urine to mark their territory will be an incentive for the dog to do his business outside as well.
However, sometimes it is not so easy. If your puppy is used to doing his business on a diaper or a piece of newspaper, we can take him outside with us and put him on the ground. We can also repeat the same word to him when he pees, for example at home, and repeat it to him outside so that he understands that this is where he should do his business. In this case, we will say ‘pee’ to make him pee and, if he does, we will comfort him by saying words of support such as ‘very good’ and we can even stroke his back a couple of times.
At six months of age, dogs are able to control their sphincter if they are well-trained.
When we go for a walk with him we should spend between 15 and 30 minutes on the walk. It is advisable to let the dog smell as much as possible. The sense of smell is his most developed sense and a great source of stimulation for our dog. He will thus get to know the territory and, in addition, he will smell the dogs that have been in the same place as him. This will be a great support for learning to do his business on the street. Therefore, we must be patient and watch that while he is sniffing the ground he does not eat anything along the way, since this is a very common habit in our puppies.
As we have mentioned when the dog is over six months old, it is able to control its sphincter if it is well trained and just going out three times a day will be enough for it to not have the need to go out more often (unless it has a stomach ache or diarrhea, in which case we can go out with it as much as it needs to or forgive it for doing its business at home since it is probably not because it wants to voluntarily but because of illness).
Problems and solutions
Our dog is a very intelligent animal. However, it will not be an easy task to teach him to do his business outside the house. Under no circumstances should we get discouraged or lose our temper. Yelling at a puppy or hitting him will not make him learn faster, but he will believe that the fact of doing his business is what makes us lose our manners and not that he is doing it in an inappropriate place.
Every day there are more dog trainers who prefer training with rewards rather than punishments with puppies and adult dogs.
It has been proven that our pet will respond much better to our orders or teachings if we do it in a positive way than if we punish them when they make a mistake, since they may not understand the exercise correctly because they do not understand the situation.
Therefore, we will always reward, both emotionally and with special dog food, any positive behavior our puppy is exhibiting. When he does something that is not what we expected, we will say the word we have selected (such as a dry and strident ‘no’) that the animal will associate with ‘I have done something wrong and my owner will be angry’.
What we can also do when the dog does his business inside the house or outside the specific place is to pick him up, take him to the place where he should have done it (always without hurting him), and react as if we were upset with him, that is, avoid him. Dogs are pack animals and they do not like to be alone or to be separated from the group. You, as the owner, are the leader of his pack, or you should always be for him, and he will try to satisfy you at all times.
By avoiding you, he will try by all possible means to make us pay attention to him: by jumping on our legs, barking or whining, or even running around the room to get our attention.
To avoid even worse behavior from the dog, sometimes we can even leave the room where we are with him for a short period of time (do not ignore him all day, as this will make him suffer too much). Since they are so smart, they will realize that we are angry with him for his behavior and will surely not repeat it in the future.
Repetition, full attention to the dog when it is a puppy, and consistency are very important to achieve our goal.
Remember that dogs, due to their intelligence, know when an owner is emotionally strong and when he is not. Dogs look for the emotionally strongest person as the leader of the pack and if they see that no one is strong enough in the home, they will believe themselves to be the leaders of the family. This may sound humorous or funny, but it is not. If the dog becomes the only king of the house, he will run wild and always do whatever he wants, which will cause us many problems in the future: such as finding his needs all over the house, even on the sofa or bed, biting furniture or tearing cushions, barking excessively and an infinite number of problems that a poorly educated dog can bring. In any case, we do not have to go to the opposite side and be too strict with our dog.
So, the best way to teach our dog to do its business outside the house is through repetition, full attention to the dog when it is a puppy, and consistency, never accepting that it breaks the rules. As soon as the dog sees that we will no longer accept its business at home and feels comfortable doing it outside, it will surely no longer want to do it at home and will feel much more comfortable doing it outside like other dogs.