This page on Housebreaking Your Dog is part of the Auxiliary Section of
the D.S. Dog Training Workshop, and an element of the Dog Science Network

Housebreaking Your Dog Through Location Training
Page One of a five-page article

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Introduction

The terms housebreaking and housetraining both refer to the process of teaching your dog to eliminate outdoors, as opposed to relieving himself inside your house.

However, this page focuses on location training, which is a bit more sophisticated than housetraining because it not only teaches your dog not to eliminate in the house, it goes a step further in order to teach him to relieve himself in one specific location, and in that one location only.

Location training is also a great way to teach your dog to use the Pet Waste Station, which is a commercially available outdoor dog commode that can be mounted down low, flush with the earth, so your dog's droppings can be quickly and easily swept into the ground level toilet bowel and flushed into the sewer system, thereby ensuring cleanliness and saving you the drudgery of having to pick up after your dog.

This article on location training was originally written to tell those who purchase the Pet Waste Station how best to get their dogs to use the facility in the prescribed fashion. However, obviously, you can also use this methodology to teach your dog to eliminate in only one particular part of your yard and never in your house.

A Quick Overview of the Rules that Govern Your Dog's Behavior

As you set out to location train your dog, you should keep in mind that even though it may not always seem so, your dog is actually a very sensible creature whose actions are both understandable and predictable. To make perfect sense of what he does, you just need to know the rules that govern his behavior.

Fortunately, there has been almost a century's worth of research into what behavioral scientists call operant conditioning. Those researchers long ago provided us with all the information you will need, not only to teach your dog to eliminate in one particular location, but also everything you will need to know in order to understand his behavior, and get him to do other things the way you want them done as well.

Rule Number One:
Your dog is the most impressed by and the most responsive to immediate consequences.
Therefore when you are location training your dog, you need to make sure that for him, the process of elimination always produces some sort of consequence, either pleasant or somewhat distressing, depending on the location he chooses.

Rule Number Two:
Your dog wants to do things that produce an immediate reward.
Therefore: if you want your dog to want to eliminate in the designated location, then, during his training, you will need to make it immediately rewarding for him when he uses the area you have set aside for that purpose.

Rule Number Three:
Your dog wants to avoid doing anything that immediately produces a result that he finds distressing.
Therefore: while you are teaching your dog to use the waste station or a given part of your yard, you will want to make sure that he finds it to be a somewhat distressing experience any time he starts to do his business anyplace else.

Rule Number Four:
From the age of five weeks to twelve-weeks, all dogs are considered to be in their critical stage of development, which is a time when you can teach your dog simple lessons with very little effort.
Therefore: If you location train your dog during that critical, eight-week window of time, then, providing that you follow these directions carefully, you should find the task ahead to be easy in the extreme.

Rule Number Five:
The rule of first responses tells us that what happens to a dog the very first time he does something, will to an extreme degree, hold sway over whether and/or how often he will choose to do that thing again. The same holds true for something your dog has done before, if he does it in a new place and/or around people he does not know well.
Therefore: It will be easier to location train your dog if you make it rewarding for him to use the Waste Station or some other location - and discourage him from doing his business anyplace else - right from the moment when he first arrives at your house, and before he ever has a chance to relieve himself in some forbidden spot.

You can still easily teach your dog to eliminate in the designated location, even if he is far beyond his twelfth week and he long ago got in the habit of doing his business elsewhere. It will just be easier yet if you begin your training when your dog first arrives on your property, and even easier than that if he first arrives while he is still in his critical stage.

Go forward to page two of the housetraining article

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This page on Housebreaking Your Dog is part of the Auxiliary Section of
the D.S. Dog Training Workshop, and an element of the Dog Science Network