This is from a web site that I read through a while back. Unfortunately, I didn't mark the URL, but this is the only note I kept at the time. Even though we hadn't had Bailey very long, we were thinking we should be making greater progress in her housebreaking. How naive! Anyway, I read this at the time: WATCH, WATCH, WATCH!
The key to successful house training is supervision. Watch your dog constantly. Your first duty is to identify what your dog does right before it eliminates. Does your dog sniff? circle? hold his ears in a certain position? Some dogs provide signals that are easy to spot, while others are more difficult. Watch carefully.
It started me thinking - any problem with Bailey's housetraining was OUR problem, not Bailey's. At that point in their lives, these little ones should be confined or directly observed every minute of every day - a pretty tough job. I didn't think about it until then, but Bailey WAS telling us when she needed to go potty. She was telling us by her behavior, but we hadn't been paying enough attention. We didn't attack the problem by just waiting to observe the "potty behavior" though.
We started regularly scheduled trips outside with treats and praise for proper behavior. We don't let her out and come back to get her later. We stay with her. Her schedule is consistent - when she goes out, how long she stays out. And the results were almost 100% almost overnight. The only "accidents" have been when our attention wandered, we strayed from her schedule, and we didn't keep an eye on her. There have been numerous occasions when we had to vary her schedule - but if we kept an eye on her and watched for her warning signs, we have been able to take her outside before an accident occurred. When we've done our job, she's done hers. |