Dogs are creatures of habit. Whatever world you show them, that’s the world they’ll believe in. As newborns, they need the stimulation of their mother’s licking to help them to eliminate wastes. In that way, the den is kept clean and the puppies thrive. When they are still tiny, still blind and deaf, the stimulation of eating begins to work wonders on its own. Still, their devoted mother ingests all their wastes and keeps the den tidy.
Some mothers, as well you know, are better than others. I’d be willing to bet that the more scrupulously clean the mother keeps the den, the easier it is to housebreak those puppies. Believing that, when my own stalwart, little bitch Fanny had her first litter, we lined the whelping box with newspaper; my daughter and I changed it as our energies would allow—at least five times a day. In between, Fanny did her job. Our eight puppies got so used to being clean and dry that when one of them stepped into a wet spot (they still could not see) it would shake its foot and cry. They just didn’t like walking around in urine, and who could blame them?
Poor initial upbringing has been the downfall of many a puppy as well as many a person. When you buy a puppy someone else has whelped and raised, what has happened before you come into his life may have taught him to be dirty or just not to give a hoot. Fall asleep in his cereal? Sure. And in anything else that’s around, too.
Some owners add to this bad early training without meaning to. They leave the puppy in a room with papers for him to soil. Often, particularly if it’s an isolated area of the house, the laundry room or someplace in the basement, they are not too regular in cleaning up. The message as your dog reads it is that it’s okay to soil in the house. If it weren’t, why would you leave the mess there?
The best thing you can do for your puppy and yourself is to clean up quickly. In this way, your message is loud and clear—or perhaps should I say, “loud and clean”. Time and time again I have been called in on a housebreaking consultation where a big part of the problem had to do with negative subliminal messages. But whatever happened before did not ruin your dog. He’s well equipped to relearn. So if you mind a dirty floor, make sure he does too. Clean up now—not later. Wash the area, every time. Vinegar will neutralize the odor that inspires your dog to keep returning to the scene of his crime. Use a cleanser that does not contain ammonia, such as white vinegar mixed with club soda. Cleanliness is only one of the ways you’ll get through to your dog without yelling, hitting or threatening to call the pound. Remember, we are dealing with a den animal. His survival depends upon a clean nest. So if we stimulate the den by placing the puppy in a very small area, he will, by relying on nothing but his own instincts and without much work on your part, begin rapidly to learn how to pace his need to eliminate so as to stay clean between outings.
Most animals have a natural desire to keep the area where they eat and sleep clean. We can capitalize on this convenient fact of life to communicate to the dog and get a necessary job done quite easily. If the dog you are trying to housebreak seems to be a dirty one, it is very possible that somewhere along the line he was taught to be that way. A pet dog cannot control his own environment. He has very little choice. Left alone in a dirty pen with his littermates or in an uncleaned playpen or other small area by himself, the puppy is unable to get a mop and bucket and clean up. He simply adjusts.
Housebreaking with a Crate
Housebreaking a puppy or a grown dog with the use of a wire housebreaking crate simply means formalizing the information above into a housebreaking regimen. You know your puppy would prefer to stay in a clean, dry area if given the chance. You know he is built to keep his little den clean. So a schedule has to be formulated, humane to him and possible for you. He will get used to going out on that schedule, on time, please, and staying in his clean, dry, small den—the crate—in between. At least, that’s what he’ll do until he’s housebroken. Once he catches on, he’ll need a little bit of time until this habit is established. Then he’ll get progressively longer and longer periods of freedom after each walk and before he is again confined in the crate. Eventually he will be reliable enough to have the run of the house. Easy? You bet.
First, let’s talk about the crate. No, it is not cruel. Providing a den for a den animal is not cruel. Although it may look like jail, since it is made out of wire, it isn’t. The fact that the crate is wire allows cool breezes to blow over your dog’s body and allows him to see what’s going on around him when he’s inclined to look. The crate, often made so that it is collapsible, will also be a handy piece of equipment for other problem correction and prevention. It is also the best and safest way to take your dog traveling. Crated he
will be unable to jump out of the car and get lost or hurt. He’ll feel secure. You’ll be able to save money on boarding by taking him with you on vacations. Motels and even hotels often accept dogs in rooms if you have a crate. It assures the management that your dog will not eat the beds, rugs and walls. Even reluctant relatives may invite you with canine when they know he can be crated when no one is watching him. And all kinds of other messages are getting through to him as he learns to accept the confinement of the crate, messages that will help you to train him and stay in charge.
For housebreaking purposes, the crate should be the size of the puppy. If it is larger than his reclining body, he can go to one end and eliminate and go to the other end and lie down. Since one end is pretty close to the other, he’ll end up waking and sleeping in urine and feces—the exact opposite of what we are after. The extra space would also enable him to move about. Moving about would make him need to eliminate. So the small size crate both encourages cleanliness and minimizes the need to evacuate.
Naturally, the crate is being used as a teaching tool and the puppy will be given as much freedom as he can handle all throughout the housebreaking period. He just should not have enough freedom, in or out of the crate, to allow him to have accidents indoors.
If you’d like to double and triple the mileage you get for your money, and who wouldn’t, I recommend a Life Stages wire crate. Purchase a medium sized one. It comes with a divider so you can adjust the size of the interior as the puppy grows. See the Puppy Supplies page for measurements. Once your dog has the idea, anyway, the bigger size will do just as well.
Many people ask if they can put something on the bottom of the crate so that the dog will not have to lie on the cold metal surface. Many dogs prefer the cold surface. However, you can put anything you like in the crate as long as your puppy doesn’t take that thing as an invitation to eliminate. If you have already papertrained the puppy, it would not be a good idea to put paper in the crate. A towel may make your puppy feel cozier, but he might urinate on it. Since the towel will absorb the urine, it won’t run all over the crate. The puppy can then bunch it into a corner and stay dry. In that way, the towel might allow the puppy to cheat. Of course, that won’t help his training any. Some puppies will make a chew toy out of a towel or anything else you put in the crate. If it makes you feel better, try one old towel. If your puppy wets it or tears it, remove it and let the puppy stay in the empty crate.
The next question is whether or not anything can go into the crate to feed or entertain the puppy. The whole idea of the crate is to imitate a natural environment that will encourage the puppy to quickly and easily train himself to eliminate out of doors on a schedule suitable to his needs and your time schedule. The idea is not to torture him, bore him, and make him miserable. Of course, he can have a ball or a bone to chew. You may, if you think it will entertain him, leave a radio playing and hope that the music will soothe his savage breast. Food, on the other hand, is not a terrific idea since it will give him a need to go out. That may happen while you are away at work.
His eating habit naturally will be another factor in the housebreaking process. It is a mistake, in an attempt to be kind, to leave food available for long periods of time or even all day long. All other factors aside, this is a very poor way to housebreak a dog. Constant eating means constant elimination. Puppies should be fed on schedule, depending on when you can whisk them out of the crate and out of the house. Food should be left down for no more than fifteen minutes. Dawdling over food is a bad habit. It may also
encourage two other bad habits—his of not being housebroken and yours of cooking little specialty items because he’s acting fussy about his dog food. Veal scaloppini is far too expensive. Let him stick to dog food and fifteen minutes. Losing a meal once or twice for acting slow and picky will encourage him to chow down efficiently when it’s mealtime. So much for veal scaloppini.
Unless the weather is ghastly and you have no air conditioning, you will not have to leave water in the crate. If you did, it would create the need to urinate, possibly off schedule since the puppy is young. However, the puppy should have as much water as he likes when he is out of the crate. Once he is housebroken, he should always have an ample supply of fresh water. Water is essential for his health—for digestion, for safe excretion of chemical wastes from his kidneys, for his body’s ability to cool itself.
Deprivation of water would be harmful.
If you are worried about leaving no water in the crate while you are out at work, leave a couple of ice cubes to melt in a dish. In this way your puppy can wet his whistle without ingesting huge amounts of liquid. Also, the water available as the cubes melt will last longer than a bowl of water.
Our next job is the preparation of a schedule. I would no more ask you to get up at an ungodly hour than I would ask your young dog to wait more than a maximum of eight hours before going out, so some compromises are in order. If you must have lights out by eleven, your puppy must be up and out of doors by seven. Cheer up. When he’s an adult, he can and will wait longer over night. But while he’s young and learning, eight hours is really all he can wait.
HOUSEBREAKING PUPPIES by Carol Benjamin
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