How To House Train An Adult Dog – Is It Too Late?

If your dog, who has been adequately housetrained as a puppy, starts exhibiting undesirable behavior in his advanced years, you might need to start considering re-housetraining your adult dog. Occasional accidents and bad dog behavior in adult dogs is not really a serious cause for concern. All you have to do is try to figure out what triggers these behaviors and communicate with your dog in order to solve the problem.

Many adult dogs who regress into undesirable behavior usually do so because of the lack of attention from the owner. If the dog is left to his own resources and given complete freedom for a very long time, it is very likely that he will forget all the training that he has undergone as a puppy. For example, if he starts urinating on the living room carpet and no one is punishing him for it, then he might think that it is now an acceptable thing to do.

With prolonged lack of monitoring, the dog will simply do whatever he wants. When you finally notice that this is happening, the only option you will have is re-housetraining your adult dog.

House Training An Older Dog

The process of re-housetraining your adult dog is not that different to training a puppy for the first time. It does require a lot more monitoring and a lot more patience, especially if the dog has been allowed complete freedom for quite some time. The plus side, however, is that a mature dog already understands the value of praise and correction. Therefore, he will be more likely to obey your commands and will be able to relearn everything at a relatively fast pace.

Scolding the dog for forgetting his puppy lessons will not do any good. It is, after all, your fault as the owner that you let the undesirable behavior go on for as long as it had. Instead, you just have to supervise the dog closely to make sure that no further accidents occur and that the dog always behaves exactly as you want him to. Just make sure that you still give your dog enough space and freedom so that he doesn’t feel too watched.

Close monitoring is essential to the process of housetraining an adult dog, especially if the dog is sneaky and tries to escape your watching eye as much as he can. Since you can’t be following your dog around all day, it would be wise to ask the help of other family members in this task.