Has a new puppy just joined your family? If you are like most house-proud families your first and biggest concern is how to house train your new young puppy. The reassuring news is that dogs do not naturally soil their den. If they can they will go outside and away from it instead. Your puppy’s mother will normally have taught these basic hygiene habits to your puppy during its first 2-3 months.

Dog owners sometimes interfere with their pet’s good natural habits. If you chain up your dog for lengthy periods it will not have the freedom to leave its kennel and may soil it. This is why a dog should be given a run several times a day to help keep its home clean. To potty train a puppy kept inside, your first step is to restrict its home to a small area. It will see this area as its “den”. Your pup will naturally wish to keep its living quarters clean. You can buy or make a crate, or set up a bed in a room you can close off, like a laundry or garage.

You can take two approaches to your house training from that point: training your pup to hold on until it can obtain relief outside, or teaching it to use a dirt tray inside. Either way, the main aim is to have the puppy relieve itself in an acceptable place, not just anywhere in your home as if it were the great outdoors. Personally I prefer training a dog, especially if it is a larger breed, to go outdoors, but this may not be practical if you live in an apartment situation, have no outdoors kennel or you are very busy or often absent.

If you have a yard, take your puppy outside onto grass as soon as it wakes and 15-20 minutes after it eats. This may happen several times throughout the day. Every 3-4 hours, much as with a baby, is a practical guideline for a young puppy. Leave it much longer and the risk of an accident increases. Reward your puppy with praise when it performs as you want. Your aim is for this to become a routine, and eventually your puppy will let you know when it needs to go outside, even outside the routine times.

Expect it to take several weeks to reach this point. You will have some accidents, but whatever you do don’t punish the puppy. If you reward positive behavior instead you will find it is a much more effective method for training dogs. A wise move is to have the puppy live in an area with a hard floor that is easily cleaned during this accident prone time. Your garage or mud room are ideal.

Keeping the puppy in a yard outdoors during the day, so that it will be asleep for most of its time indoors through the night, will reduce the demands on your time as its temporary “nanny” during this process. If you have a dog door giving the puppy access to the outside, train the puppy to use it when required. This is much less labor intensive for you, and speeds up the learning process.

Ideally the “den” area where it sleeps should initially be adjacent to this door. Of course, free access outside should not mean freedom to roam beyond a secure yard.

Access to the outside may not be practical for you. A dirt tray inside the house is an alternative. You can obtain absorbent materials to use in your dirt tray, which reduce your concerns about the smell. The tray should initially be located a short distance away from where the puppy sleeps so that it is clearly separate from its “den”.

You must take the puppy to the dirt tray when it awakens and about 20 minutes after it is fed. You need to reinforce success with praise, until it gets the idea of how to use the dirt tray. This method is a little more taxing than taking the puppy outdoors, but you must be patient. Some trainers recommend a paper-training stage before using the dirt box, to better communicate the idea. This is simply the use of newspaper laid on the floor as an alternative to a dirt tray. A little “starter” scent from last time the puppy went left on the paper helps to communicate the idea.

The advantage of using paper is a broader target-zone, and paper is cheap and easily cleaned away. You gradually narrow down this area over a couple of weeks to just the dirt tray. Once the habit of using the dirt tray is firmly imprinted, you gain some freedom to move it step-by-step further away from the den or sleeping area, perhaps to a utility room or attached garage, where the family spends less time.

Your aim is to give your puppy more access to your home in stages, to get your puppy to treat your whole home as its “den”, which it naturally wants to keep clean. It is smart to delay giving access to any dark or secluded corners too soon in case they prove a temptation before the habit to always use the dirt box is firmly imprinted. Your patience during this time will be rewarded by your puppy respecting your home as you want.

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