Puppy Housetraining Basics – Establishing a Routine

The first steps of puppy housetraining are the hardest to accomplish but once you establish a regular routine, everything will be much easier. So after preparing your home environment and picking out a potty place, you can then move on to the actual training sessions.

Use Your Dog’s Sense of Smell

Most people know that dogs have a stronger sense of smell than humans but not many realize just how much more powerful it really is. Humans have about 5 million cells in the body that can recognize different scents. Dogs have 220 million. With this vast difference, you can just imagine just how powerful a dog’s sense of smell is.

Another factor that contributes to the strong smelling powers of dogs is their nasal membrane and their brain’s olfactory center, which are both much bigger than the ones found in humans. What’s more interesting is that this extremely impressive sense of smell can actually be used in the process of puppy housetraining.

When your dog pees in an inappropriate place, take a piece of cloth and use it to wipe your dog’s behind. The scent of the pee with stick to the cloth, which you can then use in the future to teach your dog where the right place to pee is.

The next time your dog needs to relieve himself, get the piece of cloth and bring it out to the right potty area. Lead your dog to the place and show him the cloth. What he will probably do is to sniff the cloth, recognize the scent of his pee and do his business right there. If you repeat this process during each pee break, the dog will eventually learn to go to the potty place on his own, even without the cloth.

Create a Potty Schedule

For your puppy housetraining to end successfully, it is crucial that you establish a regular potty schedule with your dog as early as possible. During the early stages, a puppy would need to relieve himself as much as 14 times a day but as he gets older, this will become less frequent.

Imposing a puppy housetraining schedule on a dog may take some time and patience on your part. However, you can hasten the process by feeding your dog at the same times everyday. After a few days of following exactly the same schedule, your dog’s excretory system will eventually catch on and he will be able to control his urges much more efficiently.