Bringing home a new puppy is one of life’s great joys. It also comes with a less glamorous side: puddles on the floor, the occasional poo in completely the wrong place and an astonishing amount of discussion about bodily functions.
Toilet training is one of the most common issues new puppy owners bring to CLEAR Dog Training. Fortunately, most puppies aren’t being naughty. They simply haven’t learnt the rules yet.
The secret is good management. Make the right choice easy, prevent as many mistakes as you can and give your puppy plenty of opportunities to get it right.
Rule number one: manage, manage, manage
The number-one rule of toilet training is simple: don’t allow a puppy to wander around the house unsupervised when it might need to pee. Until your puppy is reliable, somebody is watching it, it’s safely confined in an appropriate area, or you know it has just toileted.
That may mean crates, playpens, baby gates, tethers or simply keeping the puppy in the same room as you. If your puppy keeps toileting on a particular rug and it’s practical to remove it, roll it up for a few weeks. Prevention is far easier than repeatedly dealing with the same mistake.
And look at your outside setup. We recently visited a lovely home where the easiest outdoor access led into a forecourt packed with beautiful potted plants. There was nowhere obvious for the puppy to wander around and toilet without also being presented with umpteen opportunities to dig, chew and investigate.
Sometimes a little fencing, a gate or barrier, or creating easier access to an appropriate part of the garden can make an enormous difference. Set things up so your puppy can succeed without requiring you to be an Olympic sprinter every time it wakes from a nap.
Make outside a good place to be
Your puppy also needs to be comfortable spending time in the area where you want it to toilet. Don’t make the garden somewhere it is hurried into for two minutes to perform and then immediately brought back inside.
Spend relaxed time out there together. Play games, do a little training, give your puppy a favourite chew, snuffle mat or LickiMat, or simply potter around. You want the garden to be a familiar, safe and enjoyable place where good things happen.
There is one important distinction, though. When you take your puppy outside specifically to toilet, don’t immediately launch into a game. Give it a few quiet, boring minutes to sniff and wander first. An excited puppy can become so interested in playing, leaves, birds and everything else going on that it completely forgets why it came outside.
Let the puppy toilet first, reward it, and then the fun can begin.
Learn your puppy’s rhythm
There are predictable times when puppies are more likely to need to go: after waking, eating or drinking, after play and excitement, and after being active following a period of rest.
Take your puppy outside at those times rather than waiting for it to tell you. A very young puppy may give almost no warning, and by the time you notice the circling and sniffing, you may have only seconds to act.
But puppies aren’t machines. Every puppy develops its own rhythm, so get to know yours rather than relying entirely on the clock. The aim isn’t perfection from day one. It’s to create so many opportunities to toilet in the right place that the correct behaviour gradually becomes a habit.
Outside doesn’t mean they’ve been
This is one of the biggest traps in toilet training. You let your puppy outside for 20 minutes, assume the job must have been done, bring it back inside — and 30 seconds later there’s a puddle on the floor.
The puppy may have spent those 20 minutes asleep on the grass, chasing a leaf or watching the neighbours. Going outside and actually emptying its bladder are two very different things.
With our Koolie puppy, Blink, I don’t simply open the door and assume she’s been. Before bringing her inside, we spend a couple of quiet minutes wandering around the garden while I softly say, “Toilet.” Moving around helps get things moving, and the cue tells her what we’re out there to do. Those extra couple of minutes have saved us plenty of accidents.
Put toileting on cue
Teaching a toilet cue is enormously useful, particularly when you’re travelling, competing with dogs or standing outside in the rain at 5 am wishing everyone would hurry up.
As your puppy begins to toilet, quietly say your chosen cue — “Toilet”, “Quick”, “Busy” or whatever you’re happy to say in public for the next 15 years. When the puppy finishes, mark it with “Yes”, give a small treat and quietly praise.
Timing matters. Don’t produce the treat halfway through and distract the puppy from the job. Let it finish, then pay. With repetition, your puppy begins to associate the word with the behaviour and eventually you can ask for it when you need it.
When accidents happen
If you catch your puppy midstream, don’t yell, frighten or punish it. Calmly interrupt, pick it up if practical and take it outside to finish. Then reward the right behaviour when it happens outside.
Punishing a puppy for toileting in front of you can create another problem. Instead of learning where you want it to toilet, the puppy may simply learn that toileting in front of humans is a bad idea — and start disappearing behind your favourite lounge or into another room to do it privately.
If you discover the puddle five minutes later, forget about correcting the puppy. The moment has gone. Clean it thoroughly and move on.
Do ask yourself whether there was something you could have done differently. Had the puppy just woken up? Had it been playing? Had it been too long since the last trip outside? Did it have a little too much freedom too soon?
Sometimes puppies simply catch us out. Accidents happen. But good management dramatically reduces how often they happen and gives your puppy far more opportunities to practise getting it right.
When you can’t get home
Young puppies have small bladders, and sometimes life means you simply can’t get home before they need to go. Don’t expect a puppy to do the physically impossible.
If your puppy genuinely needs access to a toilet while you’re away, provide a separate toilet area rather than putting a pee pad in its sleeping crate. A crate attached to an exercise pen can work well, with the sleeping area at one end and a pee pad, artificial turf or tray of real grass well away from it.
That’s management, not failure. As your puppy matures and develops better bladder control, you can gradually change the arrangement.
And what about overnight?
Some puppies sleep through surprisingly early. Others genuinely need one or two overnight toilet trips for several weeks. There is no prize for forcing a puppy to hold on longer than it physically can.
Keep overnight trips boring and businesslike: outside, toilet, quiet praise and back to bed. You don’t want 2 am to become the most exciting play session of the day.
Blink had a few crate accidents during her first nights with us, but we were fortunate that she soon began sleeping through until around 6 am. These days she tears downstairs first thing in the morning before producing what seems like a five-minute wee.
That didn’t happen through magic. It came from routine, management and lots of opportunities to make the right choice. Give your puppy the same chance and, before long, those puddle-filled first weeks should be just another slightly pooey puppy memory.
