This week we are taking a look into house training your puppy. It is crazy to think Dingo has been in our home for 3 weeks now! Where does time go. He is rapidly approaching the 3 month marker. His character is absolutely wonderful and we thoroughly enjoy every minute with him.
He has been to the vets and had his first vaccination and will be having his second one shortly. We are very fortunate where we live and there isn’t a high dog population around us, so he has been out to sniff the smells of the countryside. We are incredibly careful to not overdo it and keep all exercise and play to a minimum and what works for him. I thought I would share some of my house training tips which have worked really well for us.
My tips for house training your puppy
I think the most important thing is routine. I also made a point of documenting every time he went for a poo for the first week. Whilst is might seem as a total overkill, I thought it would be helpful to refer to and to get an insight into him. Dingo’s pen and run has been set up in our kitchen, as soon as we go to see him, we take him straight outside and pop him on the grass. When he has a pee, we reward him verbally and give him a pat. This is also a good time to introduce the command you would like to use. We just say, ‘go for a pee’ in hindsight, it is probably a bit long winded but it certainly works!
When Dingo is out of his pen and is with us, I religiously take him out every 20 minutes for a pee. We haven’t had one accident in the house at all by following this rule. We went to a friend’s house for lunch on Sunday and they were keen to meet Dingo, so we decided to take him along. This was his first lunch outing and he was free in their home for the whole afternoon. As you can imagine, we were on slight tenterhooks to start with as we didn’t want any accidents. Dingo, certainly proved us wrong! He happily took himself outside to go to the loo every time he needed to go. This was a very proud puppy owning moment!
When we realised he wasn’t going to make a mess in his pen, we removed all the newspaper we had put down. This was a great source of entertainment for him, much less so for us!
So to summarise
- Routine, routine, routine
- Pick your command
- Reward your puppy every time they go to the loo
- Be consistent
- Do not get upset with your puppy if they have an accident in the house, generally it is our fault not theirs
We look forward to hearing any comments or suggestions you have in the comments section below.
