The dog on a leash is always a handful, but learning how to house train a dog can be a big hurdle for any dog owner. Dr. Suzanne Gudakunst, author of How to Housebreak a Dog, offers some excellent dog training tips in her book. She shares some great tips that should help dog owners to transition their puppies from being on a leash to free roaming once they’re a bit older.
One of the most important dog training tricks that Dr. Suzanne Gudakunst mentions in her book is paper training. A dog that has never been house trained is prone to being a problem. While some dogs may have the ability to control their bladder while they’re off of the leash, many have accidents and soil their own beds or even do not obey their owners when given the opportunity. Paper training eliminates this problem by allowing a dog to go outside when it needs to relieve itself without fearing punishment. Dogs that are not properly house trained will soon let you know by begging for food, chewing up the newspaper, whining when they need to use the bathroom, and other undesirable behaviors.
It is best to start training a dog when it’s still a puppy because you can easily teach it how to behave when you get older. However, many dog breeders don’t seem to understand how important it is to begin housetraining a dog when it is still a puppy. While they may believe that young dogs are able to control themselves, they are wrong. So, if you’re having any issues with your puppy not following basic housetraining tips, you should talk to your breeder before bringing your new puppy home.
After the puppy is housetrained, the next step is crate training. Most dog owners use crates for different reasons, but whatever the reason, crate training is essential to housetraining a dog. You want your dog to learn that it is not welcome to enter the room if there are bodily wastes left in the crate. With this training, you can be sure that your dog knows that it’s not supposed to go into its crate whenever it has a bowel movement because that means it is no longer being supervised.
Paper Training: The goal of paper training is to get your dog to go outside on a regular basis without getting in its way. To do this, you will need a bag and paper. Get the dog to sit on the paper and have it hold onto the bag of paper. Whenever it goes inside the house, give it a treat so that it learns that it is doing something good for itself.
The bag and paper training can work in conjunction with crate training. If you want to crate your dog, you can place the crate in the same place as the paper bag and leave the dog inside for hours. As soon as the dog has to go out, put the crate door open. As the dog approaches the door, give it the treat. This will make it understand that the house is no longer a place that it must stay because of its bad behavior.
Play: One of the best things that you can do to house train your dog is to play with it. This will show it that the outside world doesn’t frighten it the way that it fears when alone. Dogs need to play, and play often to show them that there is life outside the boundaries of their home. The more you can play with your dog, the better it will feel about being taken out. It will begin to see that there are other dogs out there, other than itself, that it can play with.
All of these techniques can be used successfully when you are looking at how to house train a dog. It doesn’t matter whether you have an older dog, or a puppy. The training can be done easily and effectively. In fact, training a dog may be one of the simplest things that you ever attempt to do. You will begin to wonder why you didn’t try it sooner!
