YNP #039: The Most Common Potty Accidents
Your New Puppy: Dog Training and Dog Behavior Lessons to Help You Turn Your New Puppy into a Well-Behaved Dog
Debbie Cilento: Dog Trainer | Dog Behavior Consultant | Owner of Playtime Paws | Belly Rub Specialist
4.8 • 917 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2019
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There is only one thing that you need to know about dog behavior to teach or stop any behavior! Yup, when it comes down to it, our dogs are very simple creatures.
In this episode, I am revealing my secret. This is what I use to solve 90% of my client’s training issues.
I have centered my life around dog behavior. And everything I have learned and observed comes down to this one thing.
SPOILER ALERT…
The one thing you need to know about dog behavior
***Dogs do what works for them…always; and they don’t feel guilty about it.***
That’s it. If your dog is exhibiting some behavior then it is working for them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing it. The trick is to understand what’s working.
We can use it to our advantage to teach a behavior. For example, you want to teach your dog to sit, you give them a treat every time their butt hits the floor when you say “sit”. Now, that behavior works for them so they are going to repeat it.
Or we want to stop a behavior. For example, your dog barks at you and you give them attention by looking at them or even telling them “no.” That behavior now works for them and they will repeat it. To change the behavior we have to take the attention away.
The top 4 most common things your dog is looking for is
- Attention
- Food
- Release extra energy
- Relieve boredom
These are not the only things but they are the place to start.
The concept is easy, it’s applying that gets tricky. Sometimes it’s super obvious (your dog jumps on the counter and gets to the food) or not so obvious (your puppy is whining in the crate for attention, not to go potty). This episode is chock full of examples on how to apply this.
Now you know my secret. This is the same place I always start when trying to teach or stop a behavior. It takes practice, but if we take a hard look at our dog’s behavior (and ours) you will see the pattern.
Press play to listen to the full episode with more details and examples. Enjoy!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to your new puppies podcast. Starting you and your dog off on the right paw. Here's your |
| 0:16.8 | host Debbie Salento. Hello and welcome to episode 39 of your new puppies podcast. I'm Debbie and today |
| 0:36.7 | we're going to talk about the most common potty accidents and how to avoid or fix them. |
| 0:44.6 | When it comes to potty training, even if you do everything right, |
| 0:49.1 | you are going to have accidents. |
| 0:52.1 | If you haven't already, episode 10 is my complete guide to the potty training |
| 0:57.5 | process and in there I discuss how to handle accidents, whether you catch them in the act or if you find the accident. |
| 1:06.4 | So here I'm going to get a little bit more specific and talk about the most common places |
| 1:12.1 | and the most common times that you're going to have accidents in the house |
| 1:15.8 | and hopefully that'll help you address them before they actually happen. |
| 1:20.3 | Okay, so let's start with the most common places in your house that they will probably happen. |
| 1:28.0 | So they tend to be attracted to anything absorbent. |
| 1:32.0 | So they're going to be more likely to go on a rug as opposed to a hardwood floor or if you have towels or even their own bed. I'm not 100% sure why other than the fact that it's |
| 1:48.0 | absorbent but I've seen it enough where I know that it's normal that a puppy running around the house and then run into |
| 1:56.4 | their crate have an accident and then run back out. Now I'm not talking about |
| 2:01.0 | if they're sleeping in their crate they're inside their crate and they have an accident. |
| 2:04.2 | We're going to talk about that later. |
| 2:05.9 | I'm talking if they're out of their crate and the crate doors open, they run in, they have an accident, |
| 2:11.1 | and then they continue play. My assumption is that it's just an |
| 2:14.8 | absorbent place for them to go. So I had a client who's dog used to always run upstairs to go to the bathroom and it turned out is because their entire |
| 2:26.8 | downstairs was either tile floors in the kitchen or hardwood floors and upstairs is where the rugs were. the She didn't have that absorbent place to go, so she was more likely to hold it until she got outside. |
| 2:46.5 | So it's something to keep in mind. |
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