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Puppy toilet training is one of the biggest issues faced by new puppy owners. Whether you call it puppy toilet training, puppy potty training, toilet training or puppy house training, it all amounts to the same thing - introducing your puppy to going to the toilet outside rather than inside your home.
Toilet training your puppy is not difficult but it does require time and effort and more than a modicum of patience. In essence, the more you put into training your puppy to go to the toilet outside, the sooner your puppy will be fully house trained and the easier life will be for you. Like babies, puppies have poor bladder control. Sadly for the new puppy owner, bladder control is not something a puppy can learn from its parents or its siblings. More's the pity most new puppy owners would surely say! But neither is it that difficult if you follow a few simple rules. Leaving aside the fact that puppies can urinate when excited, puppies need to urinate every hour or two because of the limited capacity of their bladder. They also need to urinate shortly after waking up and generally within 15 minutes or so of eating. On Waking:
To begin with then, if your puppy generally wakes before you do, you need to change your habits for just a short while and set your alarm clock so you can be awake when your puppy wakes. Why? To begin with, you owe it to yourself because it will make toilet training your puppy a lot quicker, and most importantly, you owe it to your puppy. Imagine your puppy gets the hang of this toilet training game rather quickly. It knows what to do, it understands what is expected of it, but its small bladder can only hold so much so it still urinates in the house when it first wakes up. Imagine how you would feel if that happened to you and then imagine how your puppy must feel. It is not only psychologically damaging for your puppy, it's also demeaning. Don't let it happen. Until it's a little older and has a bladder that can cope, get up at the time your puppy generally wakes. After Eating:
Puppies generally need to urinate with 15 minutes or so of eating and to defecate shortly thereafter. So to begin with, feed your puppy at a sensible time when you yourself have the time to spend with it afterwards. As soon as your puppy has finished eating, take it outside to the garden and wait for nature to take its course. While you wait, repeat the cue word you want to use to encourage your pup to go to the toilet, be it 'wee-wee', 'poo-poo' or simply 'toilet'. Some prefer to use the two cue words, one for each function, but why complicate matters when one word will suffice. Your puppy will soon learn what is expected of it if you use the word 'toilet', and will know which function he needs at the time. The Location:
Naturally you will want to get your puppy used to going to the toilet in the garden rather than in the house, but why stop there when with the same amount of time and effort you can train your puppy to go to the toilet exactly where you want it to go. So unless you are happy for your puppy to go to the toilet wherever it choses in the garden, why not chose the area for it and contain any mess to a limited area? Simply choose the area of your garden where you would like your puppy to go to the toilet, and follow the above procedure whenever it is the right time for your puppy to empty its bladder or bowels. You will find that in no time at all not only will your pup be fully house trained and used to going to the toilet in the garden, it will soon come to recognise just one area of the garden as being his and always head straight for it.
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