Have you just got a cute little puppy, but have little idea on how to potty train your pooch correctly? Do you find many contradictory recommendations on the Internet and you don’t know which of them to follow? Take a look at 7 useful tips we prepared for you and start off on potty training your puppy right!
How to start potty training your puppy?
1) Before bringing a puppy home, allocate a safe place where you can leave your puppy when you are away. This can be a confined area like a small room or a playpen. If you do not do this, the puppy will wander around the house, pee and poop wherever they can and chew everything they can reach.
This will not only form bad habits, but it is also very unsafe. Safety should come above all.
Be sure to puppy-proof the place where you leave the puppy unattended. It is important to bend down to the puppy’s height level and make sure they cannot reach potentially dangerous objects and get injured.
2) Many people hesitate to walk with the puppy before all the necessary vaccinations are made and prefer to potty train their puppy on pads. If you potty train your puppy on pads, start by lining the entire floor surface with pee pads in the place where the puppy is left alone.
Every few days, remove a pair of pads, thus reducing the space where your puppy can go potty. Continue removing the pee pads until you have removed all but one or two sheets. In the end, the puppy will get used to going to the toilet in the same place.
3) If there’s a safe place outside the house where the puppy can walk during quarantine you can simultaneously potty train the pup both on pee pads and outside the house.
To train a puppy that is trained to pee on pads to pee outside, bring a used pee pad outside and wait until the pup does their “stuff” on it. In that way the puppy will have an association that peeing outside is safe. When you see that the puppy starts to wait for a walk to have their toilet, you may stop using pee pads at home.
4) Praise the puppy for every single time they go potty in the right place.
5) If you potty train your puppy to pee outside and don’t use pee pads any longer, keep your walking schedule consistent and walk with your four-legged friend frequently.
6) It is worth teaching your puppy a potty cue. To do this, give a verbal cue when the puppy begins to relieve themselves. From there, your puppy will associate the feeling of peeing with this word. When the puppy understands what this word means, you can use it to encourage the dog to go potty at the right time.
7) Be patient. Potty training requires time and commitment but if you stick to the chosen plan, you will quite easily and quickly potty train your puppy.
