Toilet training your puppy can take a long time, so perseverance and patience is the key! Chisel’s owners were lucky that he had already learnt to go to the toilet outside but there were some accidents a long the way! Here’s what they had to say:
“We were very grateful that the breeder had already largely toilet trained Chisel to go to the toilet outside, before we even got him. This made things a lot easier. We have of course had a few accidents. Some of them have probably been avoidable (our fault!) where we’ve been a bit slow to take him outside after he eats, or when he first wakes up from a nap. Night time has been a bit varied. Sometimes he can go 6-8 hours with a dry bed, whilst other mornings we’ll wake up to find a puddle next to his bed. Sometimes he will bark during the early hours of the morning, to let us know that he needs to go out to the toilet, but other times he will bark and wake us up, and all he wants to do is play, or go outside and chew on a stick! Overall, we think he’s doing OK and we know that it’s normal to have to go through a training process before he’s 100% toileting outside”.
Below are some tips to help:
- Take your puppy outside as soon as they wake up, after a meal, before they go to bed and every hour during the day.
- Be vigilant and watch for signs of circling or other indicators that your puppy needs to go to the toilet.
- Take your puppy to the same place each time – they will associate that area with going to the toilet. If you want your dog to go to the toilet outside, then try to train them to go outside from the start. If you’re going to use newspaper or puppy pads, do this only for a very short time, otherwise you’ll have to retrain when they get older. Note – it is OK to spread out newspaper to deal with accidents in the night.
- If you catch your puppy toileting inside, let them finish and then take them straight outside and give them their command word. Use shorter words such as “toilet” rather than “do a wee”.
- NEVER punish them or rub their nose in it. If you punish them, they think it’s because they are going to the toilet, so next time they might try to hide and do it behind thTry not to say things like “No!” or “Ah-Ah!” They are still young and learning.
- If you know your puppy can’t make it through the night, set the alarm clock and get up and let them out. This is better than responding to them barking.
