The wonderful world of potty training!
As a person who’s never had an indoor dog I naturally know little to zip about the work involved in maintaining an indoor dog. Naturally the first and biggest problem comes with dealing with the natural bowel movements every living creature must come to terms with.
We as creatures that barely like dealing with our own fecal matter are much more prone to dislike the even abhor a dog’s fecal matter in our dwellings. Consequently, countless methods have been developed in order to deal with this as least as possible. Hence, the potty training.
To better inform myself on how to potty train I found myself reading several blogs and I found them to be quite informative. Furthermore, I learned potty training definitely requires time, patience, and effort. In Dog Potty Training I found a blog with ten tips to teach your dog to urinate outdoors. I did find some rather useful rules to potty train puppies. Some of these included the need to always speak firmly to your dog but not to scream as this might scare them. Furthermore, I did find that there are commercial products to help potty train your puppy such as repellents that make him not want to urinate in certain areas.
The biggest surprise though was to find in The Ultimate House Training Guide a blog titled House Training and Sleep Deprivation that said that in order to adequately train a puppy, you need to treat them like a baby, since they can only hold their pee for up to 2 to 3 hours and it is necessary to take them outside if you want to potty train them adequately. Talk about dedication and sleep loss for a while.
My research also lead me to find a technique called crate training. Again The Ultimate House Training Guide came in super handy by informing me this was actually a really nice way to train puppies and definitely not cruel as the Crates and Puppy House Training blog informed. This is because, according to them, puppies already seek to be in dens for safety so placing them in one can actually be quite comfy for them. Furthermore, it keeps them from doing their business in there as animals don’t really like sleeping in their own feces.
My conclusion though is, that whatever technique you try, you better be prepared to place effort into this type of work as it is like training a small child. As I said, this is the wonderful world of potty training.