Dog treats

Did you give your dog a treat when they were being potty trained? We gave ours treats, and it seemed to work. She knows what "go outside" means and will usually come when I say something like "lets go outside."

 

Yes, I did. Treats are always a big help when I'm trying to teach my Homer to do something. If I didn't have a treat in my hand, he just wouldn't care about what am I saying. A bribe is always necessary!

 

Yep!

Treats are the ultimate training tool in my opinion. It works well for just about any command or trick that needs to be taught....including potty training.

 

We got our dog when she was over a year old, but we had to treat her like a puppy. She was a rescue, and we're not sure where she came from. So, we would take her outside frequently and just really get excited with the praise whenever she did her "business" outside. She had a few "accidents" along the way, but we are pleased with where we are at now. That being said, we could have tried treats. She certainly is motivated by treats!

 

We actually didn't use treats to potty train our dog. We simply tried to tell him to go outside to 'go peepee' and when he had accidents inside, he was scolded. He learned quickly, and we saved treats for more trick-like activities. If you accustom them to treats for learning everything, you're going to need a lot of treats. I do not think training a dog should be viewed as 'training' but more as 'learning how to communicate'.

 

I give treats as a treat, not to try and get the dog to do something he/she should be doing anyway. The problem with that is, the dog comes to expect a treat for just behaving how he/she is supposed to behave. There's also the point that treats for doing 'the norm' as it were, can end up with an overweight dog who sits expectantly all the time.

 

We make sure to put Trixie's nose in anywhere she "goes" inside the house. It works, but sometimes she just doesn't tell us she needs to go. Most of the time she does by barking and making specific body movements we've come to understand as needing to go outside.

 

We did, they'd do anything for treats, especially our beagle. Strange thing was though, once they were potty trained, they were terrified of going in the house. They would hold it and wimper every time when they needed to go really bad, even if we were gone for a long time. I don't know how they got so terrified about doing it in the house, we never hit them or anything - only gave them treats when they did it right.