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House-training a Puppy

Anyone can house-train a puppy, all that is needed is a little knowledge and a great deal of patience and perseverance. It can take three or four months for a puppy to be reasonably well house-trained and six months to be fully house-trained. To be successful you need to start the house-training as soon as the puppy is brought home. Young puppies will urinate frequently, and you need to try and anticipate when they are about to do this.

A puppy will nearly always urinate when it first wakes-up, so if you make a habit of quickly taking it outside as soon as it wakes, it will quite quickly associate waking-up with urinating outside. Once this trick is learnt, the puppy will want to go to the garden to urinate each time it wakes, especially if you give it praise and encouragement each time it does this. Though remember, for this to be successful, you must take the puppy outside even when the weather is bad - for this reason it is usually better to get a puppy at the start of the summer and not during the winter months.

For small breeds and very young puppies there is an alternative method that you can use especially in the winter months.

They can be trained to urinate and defecate on old newspapers spread on the floor. You must praise them when the newspapers are used and gently scold them when they are not used. The old newspapers are moved a little closer to an outside door each day. Finally they are moved into the garden before they are discarded completely. By this time your puppy will have learned to always go outside urinate and defecate.

Until a dog is six months old, it is not able control itself for more than a few hours. When older, it will be able to last a whole night.

You will know that your dog is completely house-trained when it yelps at the door to tell you that it wants to go outside to urinate or defecate.