Many of the dogs I see are not toilet trained. The first question I always ask these clients is “How often does shadow NEED to go to the toilet?”, the answer I get most often is “I don’t know.”

Toilet training becomes immensely easier when you can answer this question with complete confidence. There is a quick rule of thumb for house training puppies that is; 2 months old = 2 hours, 3 months old = 3 hours, 4 months old = 4 hours, etc…  Then your puppy can probably hold a little longer at night. Some puppies can sleep through the night, others might need a potty break.

The way to figure out how often your puppy actually needs to go is to start timing her. I encourage my clients to keep a Training Log. You keep the notebook by the door and whenever anyone takers her out for a break they write in the book; what time, what she did (pee or poo), and how long it took. Keeping the log will keep everyone in the house on the same timetable and show you quite clearly how often shadow actually needs to go out.

For people that have their dog mostly toilet trained (1-2 accidents/week). keeping the log will help you get over that last hurdle. However for beginners (young puppies) you will probably need to do a bit more to ensure the house is accident free.

1. Shadow should NOT get free reign of the house and should always be supervised. This is especially true when she hasn’t had a break in awhile. If you can’t supervise her, then I highly recommend getting a crate and doing some positive crate training. She can stay in the crate with a chew toy when you are too busy to watch her, and she may not be “empty”.

2. Keep to a schedule, and let her out before she HAS to go. This is especially true if you are having morning accidents. If she goes at 5:30 AM then set your alarm for 5AM! (then go back to bed). This will help her build her trust in you, she will get to go out before she feels like it is an emergency!

3. Always positively reinforce going outside. Give a special treat for using the toilet outside (a small bit of dried liver afterwards)! This will encourage her to hold it until she can go out, she learns to differentiate between indoors and out! Why would she go inside when she waits a little longer and gets a treat for going out!

4. For heaven’s sake don’t scold or punish accidents! That means no growling, yelling, slapping or rubbing her nose in it. All this will do is convince her of your insanity and make her try to hide the next accident in a closet, a shoe, or your kid’s room. If you have already started training this way, then stop immediately and start with the previous steps, build her trust in you again and you will start having less accidents. Although she may occasionally regress if she feels unsafe going to the bathroom outside when you are near.

The moral of this story is; stay positive and calm, clean up messes with no fuss, stay on a schedule, and reinforce with treats for going in the correct place. Stay consistent and you will have a toilet trained puppy or dog in no time at all!

If you are thinking about adopting a dog or buying a new puppy from the pet store, might I suggest you volunteer at your local SPCA for a few months first?

Here is my reasoning. If you haven’t had a dog before, or haven’t experienced the joys of rescue dog ownership then a few months as a volunteer will help prepare you for the kind of time and effort you will need to put into your new family member. And to be realistic if you are finding it very difficult to even set aside 3 hours, once a week to volunteer how likely is it that you have the time needed to take care of a new puppy or dog for the rest of her life!?

If you are able to work in a couple hours a week dog walking for the SPCA, it will give you a very good idea if you can handle a dog with “issues”.  I say this because many of the dogs given up to the SPCA have been given up because of some VERY simple and easy to fix behavior problems. Problems like Jumping up and “high energy” are two that we see a lot. These dogs were not out of the ordinary dogs by any means but so often people adopt or buy a cute puppy and don’t go to the trouble to teach it manners or give it the exercise it truly needs, then when it hits adolescence at about 8 months old they get hit with all of the extremely normal dog behaviors and are shocked that their dog doesn’t “listen”.

If you see these issues up close, by volunteering, my hope is that you will  make sure to start teaching your new dog from the very first day you get it so you avoid these same problems or better yet you fall in love with one of these abandoned dogs or puppies and decide to adopt rather than buy!

I am sure you can all tell that I am a huge fan of people adopting rather than buying puppies. This is because there are SO MANY dogs and puppies sacrificed every year due to over population. Most of these dogs are executed simply because there is not enough room or resources to take care of the abundance of abandoned dogs (and cats). So yes, I advocate adoption from a shelter! Second best is to find a reputable breeder (someone who breeds for temperament and socialization) if what you really want is to have a purebred. I understand the appeal of puppies at pet stores, but really take a step back and look at what you are promoting. Then think of how much your home would mean to a dog that has been abandoned by the family that was suppose to love him forever?

Dogs For Adoption

Dogs can learn the difference but they don’t know it automatically, we have to teach them. However, if we had to teach them each and every item they were not allowed to chew on that would take years! So here are three easy things you can do to prevent inappropriate chewing, and increase appropriate chewing!

1. Manage the Environment: Put away things you don’t want your dog to chew on. This may seem obvious, but really a dog can’t be expected to pick out his bone from a pile of kid’s toys on the floor. This also means a new dog or a puppy must be supervised especially when learning house rules to prevent mistakes. If mistakes are prevented, the dog never gets into the habit of chewing the TV remote in the first place!

2. Get Him Hooked on Food Stuffed Toys!: This part is easy, introduce your puppy/dog to a Kong or similar heavy rubber toy, stuffed with tasty treats. I use a mix of dry food, “Superior Chunky” dog roll, and small pieces of cheese! Sometimes I add boiled chicken breast or freeze dried liver. Give these toys to your dog whenever you leave him alone or whenever you want to be left alone for awhile! If you are concerned about weight, then use half his meal ration instead of treats.

3. Trading Up: In a dog’s world, if something is in your mouth it is yours. So if you haven’t trained a solid “Drop-it” cue don’t expect your dog to understand that he should give you his hard sought prize (TV remote excavated from the couch cushions) just because you asked for it. Without a good Drop-it cue you are only setting yourself up for a game of chase, which hardly solves your problem. So if you have waivered from the “supervision  at all times” rule, and your new dog just found your cell phone on a chair at perfect doggie-nose-level, then you are much better off pretending you don’t care about the cell phone, grab a dog biscuit, and offer a quick trade. Say “Drop-it” as he loosens his jaws to drop the phone and take the treat. Then don’t forget to PRAISE him! Praise is a powerful motivation to many dogs and the treat will only reinforce how wonderful it is to give you things.

When I am doing a first session with clients I usually start with introducing them to a clicker. A clicker is a small hand held noisemaker, much like you would find at kid’s parties. But for the purpose of training, it is used as a marker for behavior. A clicker is ideal for this purpose because it is a quick noise that is almost instantaneous and completely repeatable. That means you can easily teach the dog by learned association, that if they hear a click, they will get a treat.

Once the dog understands that a click will always get them a treat, you then teach them that they can demonstrate behaviors and make you click. In this way they become active in their own training and actually enjoy the learning process itself!

Because of this, clickers are used all over the world to teach a variety of different animals new or complicated behaviors.  When I worked with Big Cats we used clickers as a means of communicating to our feline friends that we liked what they were doing. This is especially important because with many large predators you can’t force them to do what you want, you have to make them want to do what you want! Frequently you are working behind a cage wall so even if you wanted to you couldn’t use physical cues to model the behavior you needed.

The same is true for dogs, if you can get them to want to do something, whether that is staying off the couch, going to the toilet on cue, or just shaking hands. You can show them how much fun it is to do the things you like! And lets be honest, if you don’t like something, you don’t do it, and if you do like something you do it even if someone doesn’t give you a cupcake afterwards.

Any time you are working on a specific goal for your dog it is helpful to keep a diary on the subject. That goal may be potty training, diminishing fear reactions, or a click-a-trick journal.

Keeping a journal  keeps you focused on what your dog needs help with and what stage of learning they are at.

Dogs learn in three stages; Introduction, Generalization, and Maintenance.

The Introduction stage is of course, where you first  show the dog what it is you want. This usually involves lots of treat and luring the dog into the position you are looking for through shaping the behavior. You can move on to generalization  when the dog can perform the cue 9/10 times with  no distractions or changes to the environment. During Generalization you start to ask for the behavior in new locations, with small distractions or maybe you cue the behavior while sitting or laying on the floor. The point is, you change 1 thing at a time and teach the dog that the cue hasn’t changed even if the environment has! Once the dog can handle many distractions or changes to the environment you are ready for the the maintenance stage.  During Maintenance you start a variable reinforcement schedule and go back to the cues intermittently to make sure the dog does not forget the cue.

Keeping a journal while training a behavior i a great way to remember what part of which cue you are on, especially if you have more than one dog!

For potty Training the journal can be extremely helpful to remind you when the last time you let the puppy outside for a break. I have found that most dogs potty train very easily and only make mistakes 9/10 times while learning. Unfortunately that 10th time you end up having to clean up a nasty mess. So I recommend to all my clients, to get that last 10%, keep the journal, this keeps fresh in your mind how long the puppy can last before they need to get outside.

As the puppy starts to trust the schedule he will find it a lot easier to “hold it” because he knows that outdoors is coming soon. Puppies who don’t have a set schedule and don’t know when their next break is coming have a much harder time getting into the habit of only going outside. 

Adopting a dog that is 5+ months old is another game altogether. They have gone through many of their critical introduction periods with very little help from anyone, as most shelters are too busy keeping that puppy physically healthy and fed.  Because of this you may get a dog with some “issues”. Many shelter staff may be able to give you an idea of what particular issues this dog may have trouble with, but many times you just won’t know until you get them out of the shelter environment and into your home.

At the Wellington SPCA  I work with many dogs on many different issues. Some of which will be easily solved by removing them from the stressful shelter environment. It is an unfortunate fact that no matter how “good” a shelter and how committed it’s staff, a shelter is not an ideal place for a dog. Dog’s are pack animals and it is highly stressful for them to be in a situation where they have no or very little pack dynamic. 

Other issues, like high reactivity due to poor social skills, is seen all too often and will probably hold over into a home environment. High reactivity means that the dog has a very low threshold  tolerance to novel stimuli. This will manifest itself as screaming, lunging, and charging  when the dog encounters this new stimuli or “trigger”.

If you have been thinking about adopting please don’t let this frighten you. Most shelter dogs don’t have this problem and the ones that do are still worth considering as your new  family member. There is nothing more rewarding than giving a dog, who has had a hard or downright tragic start in life, a safe and loving home where they can learn what it means to have a good family/pack.

So what do you do if you have found your perfect dog, and he turns out to be a little less perfect than you had hoped? There are solutions, but they do take a lot of consistency and dedication from your entire family. The saddest thing I see is when a family has adopted a dog and can’t see it through. Because it is hard work and for awhile it feels like your life is falling apart. This may seem melodramatic but those families out there who have been through this know what I am talking about.

I felt it was important to bring this up as many people are adopting from the shelters this summer. For those people I just want to say, there is  a light at the end of the tunnel. When your new companion truly trusts you, and settles into his new pack, things get easier. Through work on thresholds,  leadership, and foundation exercises, even the most reactive dog can learn to relax. Remember its a dog’s life, so lets enjoy it!