Fresh Start Pet Coaching

Rusty

Rusty is my adorable 3.5 month old Australian Shepphard puppy. Now, when my fiance and I first started to look at getting another dog. There was one major downside to puppy owning that we were not looking forward too… potty training. With our Red Heeler puppy at 6 months old, the realities and stresses of potty training were very fresh in our minds.

Obviously we chose to adopt Rusty inspite of those demands and I’m happy to say potty training has gone relatively easily. There is one thing that I had to remind myself during those potty training days: Rusty doesn’t know he’s  supposed to go potty outside.

If you think about it from the dog’s perspective it’s really quite simple: you feel the urge to go and you go. But in order for a dog to live in a human world, he’s got to learn our rules.

With potty training, as it is with most training, I have found that it is much quicker and easier for everyone involved to focus on teaching your puppy what to do as opposed to what not to do. So, the focus with Rusty has been on teaching him to go potty outside.

There are many steps to potty training a puppy and the one I want to cover here is this:

Learn your puppy’s routine so that you can reward him for going potty where you want him to go.

For an 8 week old puppy you may very well start by taking him out every couple of hours. That was Rusty’s routine during his first day home with us. Puppies  just can’t physically hold it for extended periods of time. At night Rusty’s potty breaks were every 4 hours initially, and I am so happy to say that he now sleeps through the night!

Rusty’s typical daily routing goes something like the following. He wakes up in the morning around 6am and goes potty and then has breakfast. Depending on the day i may be getting up or I may be going back to bed. Rusty is crated at night so first thing he does in the morning is drink a significant amount of water, so for the next hour or so I know there are going to be potty breaks roughly every twenty minutes.

Once his morning drink of water has passed through his system he tends to go to the bathroom more regularly, roughly every 4-5 hours.  At 6 pm he has dinner and goes potty again. At around 8-9 I pick up the water bowl and at about 10pm he has his last potty break before bed.

The point of knowing your puppies schedule is so that you can predict when he will need to go to the bathroom and get him to the properly designated area. That gives you the opportunity to reward the good behavior of going potty outside and create in your puppy the habit of doing so.  Behavior that is rewarded increases in frequency.

Now even Rusty has his accidents, although they are few and far between, and it’s always because I stopped paying attention. Think about it from your own perspective. When you have to go to the bathroom, you have to go to the bathroom. And when a puppy gets to that point where he absolutely has to go potty he will, even if it’s not where he would like to be going.

If for some reason you miscalculate and your puppy has an accident in the house just keep moving forward. If you catch him in the act, give him a sharp “uh, uh” and take him outside where you can reward him for going potty. If you don’t catch him. Clean up the mess, log what happened and where you miscalculated and start again. Before you know it you will have a fully potty trained puppy.

Here’s to successful potty training!

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