Saturday 23 April 2011

Helpline: HOUSEBREAKING!

Housebreaking Your Little One
       
Housebreaking your new puppy is going to take patience. You should begin to housebreak as soon as you bring your new puppy home. A good way to do this is with the help of a crate. Puppies need to relieve themselves approximately six times a day. It is best to keep them inside the crate if unsupervised. This will prevent your pup from hurting themselves or getting into too much trouble and will also speed up the housebreaking process!

It is instinctual that dogs do not like to soil their sleeping areas (their mummys will correct them if they do!). We can therefore use this to our advantage when housebreaking our pup.

First of all, you have to decide if you want you pup to pee/poop at home or outside. We'll be focusing more on peeing/pooping at home (in a designated area) in this article.

For those who intend on having their little one pee at a designated area in the house,
the puppy should be taken to the designated area EVERYTIME after ANY activity (by activity we mean waking up from nap/sleep and meals; that's just about the only things a young puppy would be doing anyway!). It's the same for those who want their doggies to pee/poop outside of the house. You just bring them outside instead! (Although this method might be harder at first because the time lapse between you noticing signs of peeing/pooping and the action inself is just mere seconds)
We must watch for signs of urination or defecation, such as turning in circles or intensive sniffing around. By keeping your puppy in a crate, you can have a much easier task of keeping track of your pup's biorhythm. In the event that your pup shows no sign of urination or defecation, play with them to encourage bowel movement!

Bring them to the area immediately once you see the signs! A very useful tip we'd like to share is to dab some urine from accidents that your pup so innocently was involved in on the newspaper/pee pad/peetray you would like your pup to pee/poop on! That way, you don't have to spend money on pee training sprays/drops and the scent from the urine is a familiar scent, which proves to be much more effective in encouraging a pup to pee/poop! And yes, accidents will happen, your pup WILL pee/poop at the wrong place.

Once you have brought your pup to the area, do not give eye contact until he/she does the action and when your pup is doing the deed you can choose to say a command word so that he/she can associate the action with the word. Once the deed is done, praise the dog as if it just invent the cure for cancer! Timing is key.
A puppy is not physically able to control the muscle that allows him to "hold it" until he is about 12 weeks of age. Before this time, good housebreaking routines should be practiced to avoid having your puppy urinate and defecate all over your house. It's all about understanding your dog's biorhythm and knowing the signs. Just make sure you clean soiled area throughly (with soap/vinegar/products that are able to break down the scent of urine/poop) It is much harder to housebreak a puppy if he smells urine in places you do not wish him to relief himself.

The two words we'd like you to remember when housebreaking your puppy is.....

ROUTINE! PATIENCE!
Housetraining may take varying amounts of time and effort! but it certainly can be done! do let us know here at Precious Pups if there's anything we can do to help make your Housebreaking that bit easier! 

 "i am still a baby, please be patient with me!! (: "


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