Puppy Potty Training: Be Immediate and Consistent

While many people would love for their puppy to catch on to the house rules right away, it does take some time. Puppies are of course not born with an understanding of the rules and they certainly do not come with the capability of understanding right from wrong”. Puppies only learn what is right and what is wrong from responses that he gets from you.

Puppies are not able to learn the same as people. The only reason a puppy has any desire to alter his behavior is because he wants to please you. To do his, he will take cues from you as to whether what he is doing is right from wrong. The problem starts here though because many people end up trying to correct their puppy past the time that it would have been effective.

The only way your puppy can connect your response to the behavior you want changed is if you are correcting him the moment the bad or wrong behavior takes place. If you get home from work and realize that your puppy tore apart three magazines, four rolls of toilet paper, two and a half pairs of your favorite shoes and went potty on the carpet, there is no need to start scolding your puppy. He will not connect your response to the things he did two hours ago. Simply put, if you are not catching your puppy in the act of the unwanted behavior, you cannot correct him for it. All you would be doing is confusing your dog.

So, that covers how you have to be immediate with your responses but there is another issue to tackle and that is consistency. Just as you would with a child, you have to make sure that you are correcting your puppy each and every time he gives bad behavior. It does not matter if you are on the phone, talking to the neighbor, or trying to rush out the door. You have to be consistent with your corrections or they simply will not take hold. If your puppy is only being told “no” half the time when he is running around with a shoe in his mouth but the other half the of the times you seem to not care, then he is led to believe that when you are scolding him, it can’t be because of the shoe.

This means that during your puppies “training” period, you have to be very consistent. If your puppy pees on the carpet, correct him and do it each time you see it. Training a puppy, especially the potty training part, is something that has to be consistent every day and all day long. You cannot train one day and then “rest” the next. If you do that, you will not be teaching your puppy anything. If you are consistent, you should see good results in no time at all.