How I Finally Conquered Potty Training! My TOUGHEST HOUSE TRAINING CASE YET!

we've got some huge news coming to our channel very soon now that our series reality dog training featuring biscuits the puppy has concluded i found myself really examining things that went well and things that didn't go so well so that i can learn from them and become a better trainer and if you followed that series closely you probably know we had a really difficult time with potty training specifically and i wanted to let you know what i learned from probably my toughest case ever and then telling you what biscuits dna told us about her breed makeup i was shocked by the results were you not yes i was there was one specific thing that shocked me our series reality dog training where we take a rescue dog train them and make sure they're ready for their new home is officially on hiatus we have something radically different planned for our next series there's good sorry inertia i guess this is your food i mean you don't even feel civilized putting this on the floor it's like it's designed to be eaten at the table nom nom will formulate a food specific to your dog you probably shouldn't be stealing my food i gave you your own so you get them in these pre-portioned packets like this it meets the standards of that delicate balance of nutrients that are essential for your specific dog and they arrive freshly frozen the portion is perfect for inertia right now nom nom is going to give our viewers half off a two-week trial that's a lot off to get that discount go to trinom.com zach i'll have a link below i know good stuff huh it's really on us to show our dogs how we want them to behave throughout their life and nowhere is that more true than with house training i mean the thing is puppies aren't born knowing exactly where they're supposed to do their business i mean most of us prefer for them to go outside but sometimes dogs like to go inside as we learned with biscuits quite vividly no i saw it are you serious you cannot put all of these accidents on the internet this is downright bad i was so embarrassed at certain parts of this series bree like but that's what we're about we're about being honest real transparent and showing you the struggles that we go through those really are the most interesting parts of these dog training series that we do i think for years i've done plenty of videos on what the ideal situation is but so often things are not ideal okay so the first major point about house training should be very obvious control your dog's environment i mean they can't go poop in your dining room if they can't get to your dining room right but see our overall goal is to eventually teach our dog that our house including the dining room is also their house and the thing we're banking on is that dogs typically long term don't want to do their business in places that they identify as their primary residence but you know it can take a while for a dog to generalize a big human house as their living space so for a puppy like biscuits she might be like okay the bedroom that's where i sleep at night that's kind of my primary area out here in the living room i guess i can do my business there it's not like i have to sleep in it or anything so in her mind that living room very well could be what we would think of as a front yard here come on let's go over here so generally the game plan is to slowly give your dog access to the entire house initially keeping their primary living area very small and keeping them in a very tightly controlled situation throughout the day like having them on leash as you walk with them about the house that way you're more clued in if they're about to have an accident and you have to give them more than enough opportunities to relieve themselves in places that you deem appropriate in hindsight i kind of messed up on both of those things in other words i think i probably gave biscuits a little bit too much freedom in our living room and i probably didn't let her outside often enough so with biscuits we had one big area in our alaska house where we could easily supervise her and i think even that was probably giving her too much freedom if you want to have your dog off leash in those initial phases you would need to be in a much smaller environment this is what i've learned like bathroom sized environment otherwise you really need to have them on a leash so clearly this way your puppy can't wander off and pee or poop when your attention becomes divided and also when you have your puppy on leash you really get to know them and it's easier to zone in on when they have to go maybe they'll jump up on your leg or maybe they'll gently pull you towards the door i mean every dog is different but almost all of them will behave in a way that is easy to correlate with them having to go outside another great way to control the environment is by having baby gates up so that you can keep the areas smaller and make it easier for you to supervise them it's impossible for us to supervise our dogs all the time though so for that reason you have to have a puppy-proofed area where you can tolerate accidents should they occur maybe it's a large playpen you really want to go out of your way to make sure that your puppy is so extra comfortable in whatever area you choose because increasing their anxiety isn't likely to help matters and with biscuits she didn't take to her crate quite as easily as i had hoped which complicated matters and made it more difficult to control her environment so giving her a really good quality chew really helped her spend lots of time in the crate where she was enjoying herself thus we were able to kind of create that different emotional response if her crate became an area where she could be like i love this place because i get this chew then we could start turning the tide and reducing that anxiety so in biscuit's case she really loved those turbo tenants which were designed for giant dogs which kind of makes a lot of sense knowing what we know now about her breed but anyway more of that in a second those come from pupford by the way they're super long lasting kind of important you don't want your dog going through a chew in 30 seconds i use pup for treats all the time when i'm doing training whether it's potty training or otherwise because they're also super high quality they're very unlike other treats that you're going to find on the shelf even if pupford wasn't one of our sponsors i would be loaded up on those products also i know many of you have taken my 30 day perfect pup program through pupford as well which is all completely free if you've got a puppy i had you in mind when we designed that course i'll have information on everything puffered below but ultimately over the three weeks that biscuits was with us we did get her comfortable with being in the crate and you can see that series and how we went about that process if you're struggling with that the whole logic of using a smaller crate is that it's easier for a dog to generalize oh this is where i sleep so i won't do my business in here and then the second you let them out you can take them to where you want them to go versus a big room like with biscuits where she was like yeah we play over here all the time but over there on that side of the living room that's okay that looks like a great place for a bathroom oh yep it was and seriously we want to be very sparing about how we use the crate like no more than three or four hours at a time for a young puppy and generally there's an exception with overnight where it's probably okay to leave them in there for a good eight or nine hours unless they wake you up telling you they gotta do their business the way that i utilize a crate is to keep them safe for short periods of time when i can't directly supervise them now if you have to go to work for like eight hours it's a good idea to come home at lunch if you can or have a friend or relative come and let them out to give them those opportunities now in biscuit's case she just had a lot of anxiety that we had to work on slowly with the crate but in most people's case if your dog doesn't like being in the crate and you've tried for say up to a week to get them comfortable with it there's a good chance that they are not sufficiently physically and mentally exercised and that helps a ton so taking a one-hour walk before bedtime with them can be a great way to prime them to do well in their crate overnight but no not in biscuits case she couldn't make my job easy and in her case it turned out to be okay because most of her accidents weren't really happening overnight because she was on my chest most of the time what are you looking for it's just funny what's happening in the bed right now nothing's happening the dog is in the crate as i thought i don't regret that have you ever cuddled with a dog like biscuits i think i must have added at least two years to my life so even though i was having trouble potty training her i really felt like my quality of life overnight was dramatically increasing i mean was it really that important to potty trainer anyway i mean yeah just come clean zach i was slacking and i paid the price for it yeah you did sleep in bed with her for like two-thirds of the series so i really had to do some critical thinking and analyze all right how are we going to get this dog back on track with house training i mean i remember thinking zach you're a dog trainer you're smarter than this little yellow dog so i decided to put her crate near my bed at night so that way she could see that i was at least there and that seemed to make her more comfortable she looks happy as a puppy when you have a puppy you've got to be prepared to let them out in the middle of the night if they start crying in the beginning it's normal to have to do this up to about four times overnight but usually twice with most of the puppies that i've really done these in-depth training series with has been pretty good when you do take a puppy out for a break be prepared to be out there for like five or ten minutes five or ten minutes on a potty break can be the most boring thing in the world and it feels like forever honestly guys this is an area where i could have done a lot better usually i will take a puppy out once an hour in the beginning just to give them lots of opportunities maybe even every 30 to 45 minutes and then after a few days of that once i get to know the puppy i might let them out every couple of hours and then hopefully within the first 10 days every three to four hours prior to this training series i visited alaska the last two summers and it was beautiful it started snowing like all the time no one told me there was so much snow in alaska they should put that on the internet or something so people know i don't like being cold in in the snow and so with biscuits rather than letting her out once an hour i tried to stretch that to 90 minutes and it just got out of hand too quickly and i wasn't giving her enough opportunities i knew it i knew it and so i was reminded of one of my own dog training laws if you want success you need to be relentlessly consistent you know it should go without saying that we don't punish potty accidents again if our dogs do their business in the house it means we need to do something different if you're having potty training relapses that seem to come out of nowhere there's a good chance there's a medical issue i can't blame that on biscuits because we had her checked out thoroughly and there was no evidence that there was anything medical causing her issues just a lack of consistency on my part now we were able to catch biscuits in the act several times which is not quite as good as getting them out ahead of time but probably better than letting them finish so if you can catch them right before they do it you can pick them up and escort them to the proper place this if it's already too late in the accident happen we just clean it up and do better next time just period there is no yelling at them or scolding them that's not going to be productive another thing that came into play with biscuits was when she was staying with us it was a completely new environment you might have noticed this with your own dog or if you haven't understand that like a change in environment can often cause a regression in house training that's normal so do what we did and just go back to basics so ultimately with biscuit she was doing fine by the time that she left us and she was able to go three or four hours pretty easily without an accident and we were very consistent about letting her out so fortunately we were able to get back on track we do have another loose end to wrap up with the series because you guys called us out big time on it we never told you what biscuits breed makeup was this is one of our favorite things to do with these dogs that we work with like knowing their dna is amazing and be honest and tell me what you think or thought biscuits breed was i thought she was a chihuahua mix basically that's what she looks like right she looks like a little chihuahua dog but she's a puppy too and almost all young puppies kind of look like chihuahuas if they're young enough what's interesting particularly about these alaska dogs is they're at least in her case she came from a remote village of all of the dogs we have ever tested biscuits has the most number of breeds inside of her and the moment you've been waiting for she's 5.2 percent west highland white terrier i mean only 5 you can see why that's not obvious but pretty cool i mean how did west highland white terrier end up in an alaskan village this is a huge surprise she's 6.7 percent german shepherd dog german shepherd that little thing that to me was a huge shocker 11.3 percent maltese 11.8 percent lhasa opso 15.4 small poodle and 25.7 chihuahua ah you got it yes surprise surprise she is 12 and a half percent super mutt which is where they have so many different trace amounts of different dog breeds i guess and they still give you an estimate of what that super mutt is made of they give you a nice breakdown here test we like to use is embark they not only tell you the breed makeup but they also tell you a lot of health concerns i love them because we get so much more data than any other dna test with these dna tests it's easy to fixate on okay the breed but they also give you health information which is probably a little bit more applicable and practical i mean the cost of it is less than a vet visit so it's really pretty priceless data embark is a sponsor of our videos but we use these whether or not they're sponsoring us actually just today or yesterday i emailed embark and i was like what kind of discount can we give to our viewers because i know you're going to really enjoy this it's the coolest thing so they created a special link for us where you can get a substantial discount 15 percent off you can use the code zac george 15. i'll have that linked below and also check out puppets products if you're looking for a revolutionary top-notch dog food you've got to give nom nom a shot half off they're giving you to try it out for two weeks i think it's well worth it and we are about to go places we've never gone before on this channel and i think it's safe to say that brie and i are going to learn about a side of ourselves that we've never met before stay tuned that series is currently in production i'm a little nervous you should be nervous subscribe and click the bell so you get notified every time we upload a new video follow us on twitch and instagram free if they wanted to follow us on tik tok or instagram or subscribe to my channel they know they can do all that links below check out my books if you like books if you want to read my books okay they get like four to half stars on amazon okay we will see you in the next video or series or next video i don't even know what's coming up next on this channel so stay tuned we're in one of those like transitional moments you

Channel: Zak George’s Dog Training Revolution

Views: 96,201

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Id: t68E7g4D4dU

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022