Training a dog where to pee and poop is a major priority for most new dog owners. But there is a lot of misinformation on how to do it -- we don't even have a term for it that make sense! Are we training the house? Is it still "house breaking" if you live in an apartment? Annie breaks down how to take on this task in a way that can be easy and error-free using smart management tools, good timing, and well-thought out rewards. If you have a question for Annie or want to request a guest, join our Facebook Group at facebook.com/groups/schoolforthedogs 

Show Notes

10 Steps to House Training



About: Dog trainer Annie Grossman loves to find engaging ways to help both dogs & humans approach training as an exercise in better understanding all animal behavior. Please make sure to subscribe & give us 5-stars on iTunes!

Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Hey everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Today, I wanted to talk about one of the main reasons that people contact a dog trainer, especially when people get a new puppy and that is they want their dog to know where he should and should not pee and poop. Now, I am going to talk in particular about how to work on training a puppy, but most of the tips I'm going to give could be applied to older dogs as well. Whether it's a new dog in your household or a dog that just needs a refresher course, but first of all, what do we call this kind of training?

Well for simplicity, I'm going to refer to it as house training. But I think it's kind of a weird way to refer to it because first of all, like most of my clients, I don't actually live in a house and also aren't we training the dog to not go in the house most of the time? So wouldn't it be NOT in house training? I can only think that it's a term that must stem from a time when dogs mostly lived outside and so training them to be in the house meant training them to not eliminate in the house.

Um, but actually in advance of doing this episode, I tried to research a little bit the origins of different ways that people have referred to what we're calling house training. And I looked up the word house breaking, which is also a weird term. I think it's generally understood at least as it applies to dog training. But I mean if you're “breaking in” something that you're kind of like doing something to the thing right? Like you break in a pair of shoes or I guess you break a horse, that's another training term, but you're not doing anything really to your house, although, maybe you are, because I am going to suggest some ways that you can set up your home to help with house training, but still house breaking I dunno, it's kinda weird, right?

So I put it in to Google's Ngram search tools, which shows when and where and how words have been used. And as far as I can tell, it looks like up until,maybe like the mid 1900’s, housebreaking really referred to breaking into a house. It didn't really have anything to do with dogs. And that's still a definition found in many dictionaries. But then I looked it up in the online dictionary, Oxforddictionaries.com and it gives the definition “housebreak: verb housebroken, housebroken, train a pet to urinate and defecate outside the house or only in a special place; house train.” And then the example it gives is, “an elephant is exceedingly difficult to housebreak.” And I mean, why are you trying to teach an elephant to not pee or poop in your house? Why do you have an elephant in your house to begin with?

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