Old School Puppy Housebreaking Paper Training

The old style of housebreaking puppies, is still being used today with great success. For those of you not familiar with the old way of housebreaking your puppy, let me explain. Back before you could buy dog crates, puppy crates or puppy pens. The puppy owner used to put newspaper down on the floor, in about a five foot by five foot square, in front of whatever door they wanted to teach the puppy to go out of.

The comical part was, when everybody was home. If you saw your puppy getting ready to relieve himself somebody had to run over, pick the puppy up and put him on the newspapers. Now this actually works great, for the folks that do it. In a week or two your puppy will start going to the newspapers by him self.

He doesn’t always make it there in time, but he’s trying. The advantage of this is, now it becomes real easy for us to tell when hes getting ready to go. We took the guess work out of it. He goes to the door, he has to go to the bathroom, we open the door and take him out. It accelerates his learning process a little bit.

And what we did when we weren’t home, was make a wooden barricade usually propped up with kitchen chairs to keep him near his puppy papers. And yes the puppy would escape out of there. Sometimes he would leave presents for us, around the house. And sometimes, he would actually go back to the newspapers.

These days you can accomplish the same thing by using a puppy pen. The way you paper train your puppy is, for the first couple weeks that you start the paper training, the area that the papers cover stays the same. Then once a week or every ten days, you would remove a couple pieces of the newspaper. And if your puppy continues to go on the newspapers in the little bit smaller area, the following week you remove a little bit more newspaper. And you would continue doing this , until you were down to three or four sheets of newspaper.

Remember, as long as he keeps going on the newspapers you can remove a few sheets. Every once in a while, expect little set backs. If this happens, replace the newspapers back to the original size. Also, sometimes your puppy may be standing on the newspaper with his butt hanging off the papers. He’s still getting it right in this case.

Part of the problem we have today is, most of us don’t put the puppy pen or crate near the door. So then your puppy has a hard time figuring out that going to the door is our cue to take him out. We usually have the puppy crate of puppy pen, in another part of the house, away from the door. This makes it a little bit more difficult. But nothing we can’t handle.

Have a great day

The Spirit Dog

© Copyright 2008  a.s.papszycki