How do I toilet train a puppy?

Toilet training is almost entirely about your schedule rather than the puppy's learning ability. A young puppy has very little bladder capacity and almost no warning, so accidents are a failure of the timetable rather than of the dog. Get the frequency right and the reward timing right and most puppies pick it up remarkably quickly.

Safety

What you'll need

• Enzymatic cleaner
• Treats kept by the back door
• A crate or pen (optional)
• Waterproof footwear and a torch for the night trips (optional)

Step by step

1. Take the puppy out at every predictable moment.After waking from any sleep, after every meal, after every play session, after any excitement, and last thing at night. Those five moments account for most of what a puppy needs, and hitting all of them is most of the training.
2. Add a timer in between.Roughly every forty-five minutes to an hour for an eight-week-old puppy while it is awake. It is a lot of trips. The interval extends with age — a rough guide is that a puppy can hold on for about an hour per month of age, plus one, though that is a maximum rather than a target.
3. Go to the same spot every time and stay boring.Same patch of garden, on a lead if the puppy would otherwise play. Stand still and say nothing. Talking, playing or walking about distracts the puppy from the job.
4. Reward within two seconds of it finishing, outside.This is the step that does the teaching, and the one people get wrong. Praise and a treat immediately, in the garden, while the puppy still associates it with what it just did. Rewarding once you are back indoors teaches the puppy that coming inside pays.
5. Add a cue once it is happening reliably.Say a quiet word as the puppy starts, every time, for a few weeks. Eventually you can use it to prompt, which is genuinely useful before a car journey or last thing at night in the rain.
6. Supervise or contain, with nothing in between.When you cannot watch the puppy directly, it goes in a pen or a crate, or on a lead attached to you. Puppies do not usually toilet where they sleep, and an unsupervised puppy in a large house will find a quiet corner.
7. Learn the signals and act on them instantly.Sniffing the floor, circling, sudden distraction from play, heading for a door or a rug it has used before. When you see it, pick the puppy up and go out immediately — do not finish what you are doing.
8. Handle the nights with one or two trips.Most eight-week puppies need at least one night trip, sometimes two. Carry the puppy out, no talking, no play, no treat beyond quiet praise, straight back to bed. Most puppies drop the night trips by around four months on their own.
9. Clean accidents with an enzymatic cleaner and say nothing.Ordinary household cleaner leaves the scent markers that draw the puppy back to the same spot, and anything containing ammonia actively resembles urine. Clean it out of sight of the puppy, without comment, and note what went wrong in the schedule.
10. Be honest about puppy pads.They teach a puppy that toileting indoors is acceptable, and most puppies then have to be taught again that it is not. If you live in a flat and genuinely cannot get out quickly, use them by the door and move them gradually outside. Otherwise skip them entirely.

Tips

• Keep the treats in a tub by the back door. Going to the kitchen for one puts you well outside the two-second window that matters.
• Write down every accident with its time for a week. The pattern almost always shows an obvious gap in the schedule — most often mid-afternoon or right after a nap you did not notice.
• Cold, wet weather is when people stop going out with the puppy and start letting it out. Standing outside with it is what lets you reward at the right moment, so it is worth the coat.

Common mistakes

• Rewarding the puppy once it comes back inside — The puppy connects the reward with coming indoors, not with toileting. The praise and treat have to happen outside within a couple of seconds.
• Punishing accidents — The puppy cannot connect the two, and it commonly learns to toilet out of sight instead — behind the sofa, upstairs — which makes training take far longer.
• Cleaning with an ordinary or ammonia-based cleaner — It leaves scent markers, and ammonia smells like urine. An enzymatic cleaner breaks the residue down so the spot stops being a target.
• Letting the puppy out rather than going with it — You cannot reward what you did not see, and you do not know whether it actually went. Standing out there is the training.

If it doesn't work

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