Ok you have your new cuddly little dog, now it’s time to house training a puppy before it begins to go to the bath room all over your house. Here are five tips you need to do in order to ensure you have a great potty training experience with your dog.

1. Buy a crate.  This is an essential element to getting your puppy house trained fast. Having a crate gives your puppy a sense of it having a den that it lives in.  Most puppies will do pretty much anything to avoid going to the bath room in it own den.

Besides it helping to house training a puppy, it will also serves as a place your little dog can sleep, relax and generally feel safe. You won’t have to have a crate forever, if you don’t want one, but in the beginning, it is crucial.

2. Find a good potty spot. Now that you have your crate, it is time to find a good potty for your puppy to poop and pee. It will depend on your particular living situation, but try and keep the spot on your own property. If you have a back yard that is probably the best place. It is not too far and is easy to get to for you and your puppy. Ensure you can easily clean the area regardless of where it is since dogs do not like dirty bathrooms either.

3. Create a scent magnet. Your puppy has about 1000 better ability to smell than you do so you can use this to your advantage as you are in the process of how to house training a puppy.  Once you have your potty spot picked out, and after your puppy has gone to the bathroom here, take a soft cloth or towel and wipe its behind.

The next time your puppy has to go potty, you can take it outside to the spot you have picked out and put the cloth on the ground. Your dog will smell the cloth, recognize that it used the area to go potty before and therefore it will go there again. This technique can quickly train your little dog to use the potty spot for its bathroom breaks.

4. Make a bathroom schedule. Puppies are like babies, they cannot always hold their pee and not always they have to go on a particular schedule. You can start to get your dog used to going at certain times though, so that it will hold it until the next time, “creating” in this way a kind of routine that your puppy will get used to. This is a very important step on how to house training a puppy as it will train your puppy body to have to go when it goes outside of the potty spot,  teaching your little dog to not hold it and go at other times, when you have time to walk it.

5. Have a bathroom command cue phrase. When you take your puppy to the potty spot, you will notice it will start sniffing around and circling. This is the cue that your dog is about to eliminate. Once this happens, develop a cue or a phrase you can use for your dog to signal it to go to the bathroom. Nothing elaborate is needed, ‘go potty ‘ or ‘go to that bathroom” is all that is needed. It is very important you use a nice tone of the voice, you need to kindly connect with your puppy. This gives your little dog the command cue that it is time to go pottying and it will recognize it even if you are away from home or using a different potty spot in the future.

These five tips for house training a puppy can be the difference between success and failure. Use them and along with some patience and vigilance, you will have a puppy that is house trained in no time flat.

P.S.: In case you are looking for a great and thorough guide on how to housetraining a puppy I can recommend the following guide I use for my puppies, it is written by Morten Egtvedt & Cecilie Koesteh, a married couple of professional trainers from Scandinavia, Morten has also trained dogs approved for military service for 13 years and is a certified dog training instructor in the Norwegian Army.