6 Tips For Successfully Housebreaking Your Puppy
Housebreaking your puppy can be a stressful experience for both you and your new pup. Born deaf, blind, and with no teeth, puppies are incredibly sensitive to the world around them. Taking in their first experiences of life through only touch and smell. Unlike human babies they quickly develop and are ready for their new home from around 12 weeks of age.
Leaving their siblings and mum as well as the only home they’ve ever know can be very stressful for young puppies.
Which means your puppy needs all the support and love they can get in their new abode. To aid you and your pup in their development. Here’s six tips from dog owners that are sure to help in successfully housebreaking your puppy.
1. Positive Reinforcement
When your puppy does something you want them to do. You need to show them so by offering them praise and giving them a treat. The trick is to do it immediately after the activity, so they know what you’re referring to and link the reward with the behaviour, and thus the behaviour with being good.
2. The Space Rule
As it’s seen as a novelty and luxury for your pup, space is another way of rewarding dogs for being well behaved.
Introduce too much of it too soon, though, and they may become overexcited by all the new stimuli. Gradually expand the territory your puppy is allowed to explore, instead, and you’ll help keep them from acting out and better under your control.
3. The 15-Minute Rule
Puppies tend to want to go to the loo within fifteen minutes of eating or drinking, as well as after exercising or waking up from a nap.
You can use this knowledge to your advantage by giving them the opportunity to go to the bathroom within these constraints. This will help reduce unwanted accidents when housebreaking your puppy and train in a habit of doing what they’re told at the time you want them to.
4. Mistakes Happen
Mistakes will happen when house training your puppy — that’s a given. What matters is how you deal with them to ensure they don’t keep happening over and over again.
If your puppy does something they shouldn’t, without scaring them, interrupt them with a startling noise or expression. Show them your disapproval and take away some of their privilege, say by putting them out. Your puppy doesn’t know right from wrong, but by doing this, will gradually begin to associate the things you don’t want them to do with being bad.
5. Establish Routine
As with babies, puppies do best when given a schedule to abide by. With a little bit of structure and simple action-reward routines, they’re more than happy to do as they’re told and behave.
When housebreaking your puppy, routine should be scheduled bathroom breaks, as per the 15 minute rule, a regular feeding schedule, and night time routine.
6. Your Attitude
As dogs are so sensitive to the chemical changes in your body, if you approach housebreaking in a rushed or anxious manner, your puppy is much less likely to respond well.
It’s also why using high-pitched tones that don’t match your chemistry don’t work. A better approach is to be calm and collected and patient with your puppy as they learn. If you’re tired or get upset, try not to take it out on them, and always take some time to be conscious of how stressed or relaxed they seem.
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