Tips for Puppy Potty Training and a Trick to Stop Chewing

By: David Codr

Published Date: March 23, 2017

Penny Mini Daschund - Tips for Puppy Potty Training and a Trick to Stop Chewing

Penny is a five-month-old Mini Dachshund puppy who lives in Omaha. Her new guardian set up a puppy training appointment with us to stop her from having accidents in the house, chewing things up and stop jumping on humans.

Penny’s guardian has a baby gate to keep her confined to the kitchen when she cannot be completely supervised. This is a great strategy when raising a puppy as it helps them avoid picking up bad habits like chewing on furniture, shoes, etc.

When she met me at the door, Penny showed some hesitation which can be attributed to a lack of guests visiting. I recommended that the guardian invite friends over to visit to help with this. If the guests come in, drop a few high value treats and wait for Penny to approach them, it shouldn’t take her long to grow more confident during the greeting ritual. After all, what puppy doesn’t like treats? This is why positive puppy training works so well.

I used this same approach with my Dalmatian puppy Quest, setting him up in a spare bedroom as detailed in this post. Frankly it made things so much easier that I will never raise another puppy without doing so. At five months old, I could leave Quest out in the house with no supervision and he never chewed on anything but dog toys.

To address Penny’s potty training issues and accidents in the house, I suggested the guardian check out the potty training post I have on Quest-Ed a collection of puppy raising tutorial videos I added to my website to help new puppy guardians solve many common puppy problems.

If you have a new puppy or know someone who does, you should check out the Quest-Ed section of Dog Gone Problems as there are a ton of puppy obedience tips and puppy behavior secrets posted there for free.

Another post on Quest-Ed offers some puppy training tips to curb another common problem; puppy chewing.

By the end of the session, Penny was starting to sit to ask for attention, wasn’t jumping up as much and was using the new dog bed instead of the couch. It will take practice and attention to stop the accidents as she becomes more potty trained, but due to her above average intelligence, I’m guessing this will stop puppy accidents in the house and if enrolled in our puppy socialization class, should stop nipping and mouthing.

At the end of the session I spent a few minutes laying out a Roadmap to Success for Penny and her guardian which you can check out in the video below.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Categorized in:

This post was written by: David Codr