Potty Training and Chewing Tips For a English Bulldog Puppy in Santa Monica

For this Santa Monica puppy training session, we taught 15 week old English Bulldog Bear to stop nipping, how to “leave it,” some basic commands and a few potty training tips.

Bear had a very chill relaxed energy when I arrived for the session. He came to the door to greet me showing good curiosity but in a fairly subdued way. Not what I expected from an English Bulldog puppy, LOL!

The guardian had hired someone to put the puppy through an intense eight hour a day training regimen before this session and what she described to me over the phone gave me concerns. After discussing what is this trainer did with the puppy, I’m pretty sure she was a novice. Her idea of puppy pad training was to walk over to the puppy pad repeatedly, point at it and say “here.”

While Bulldogs have a reputation for being very determined, you don’t have to have English Bulldog trainer in your job title to be able to teach a young dog new tricks. However, when it comes to puppies, you want to keep lessons short, under 3 minutes max. An 8 hour intensive training program wouldn’t work for adult dogs, let alone a puppy with a typically short attention span.

We started out by discussing the importance of the Critical Socialization Period, getting Bear into puppy socialization classes as well as immunization shots and precautions to keep him safe.

His guardian had purchased a puppy play gate so I showed her to set up a long-term confinement area which will be a lifesaver for her because Bear has started to potty in his kennel.

If you have a puppy who is urinating in the kennel as soon as you get it, that’s generally the sign of an inexperienced or poor breeder. Unless the puppy gets a urinary tract infection or was kept in a crate too long (the case with puppy mill dogs), its pretty unusual for a puppy to pee in the kennel. Not soiling the sleeping area is one lesson mothers teach their puppies pretty early on.

Attaching a kennel to a long-term confinement area (ADD LINK HERE) gives the puppy the ability to exit the kennel and urinate away from where it sleeps. With enough practice, this should become a permanent behavior from Bear. I share a number of puppy potty training tricks in the video below.

In addition to sharing some puppy potty training tricks, I wanted to help the guardian get Bear started on basic obedience training so I taught him to sit, lay down, sit up and stand. I snuck in some bonus footage where I shared some potty training tips, how to stop a puppy from chewing people or furniture, the benefits of using a long-term confinement area and how to leave it.

If the guardian practices the exercises I detailed in the above free puppy training video, it shouldn’t take long for Bear to learn all those lessons and stop having accidents in the kennel.

I asked the guardian to stay in touch with me in the week or two following our session to make sure that she is able to stop Bear from peeing in his kennel as well as if she has any questions on the basic puppy training tips that I shared in our session.

Hopefully she can find and enroll Bear into a puppy socialization class soon. The younger a puppy gets exposed to other puppies, the more time and practice they get to develop good socialization skills. Confidence in dealing with other puppies will pay off for the rest of Bear’s life.

When it comes to puppy school, the most important thing is socialization with the other puppies, but it needs to be good socialization. A class with too many dogs can stress out a puppy making it feel overwhelmed. Additionally, until a puppy reaches 4 months, you want to really limit any negative experiences it has. This is a fear period and negative experiences that happen during this time can really stick with a puppy.

Socialization will be important until the puppy develops its true personality somewhere around 9 months. Setting up play dates with dogs of all kinds of shapes, sizes, personalities and energy levels will prepare him to deal with just about any dog socialization encounter.

To help the guardian remember all of the puppy behavior suggestions I made during this in-home puppy training session, we shot a roadmap to success video.