Howdy all,
My sister and I recently moved into a house together and she has a 4 month old Basset Hound puppy. The puppy is quite adorable, but, she has only had it for a couple of months. Her old roommates made no real attempt to train the dog well, so we’re still working on the fundamentals of going to the bathroom outside.
Since she’s working nights and I’m working days, puppy has pretty good access to us.
Basically, what we’ve been doing is leaving her outside - it’s very mild and seasonable here right now, she has a bed outside and access to water and plenty of shade, plus a big fenced yard to poke around in with lots of birds and squirrels. She seems to like it and I see her wandering around out there a lot when she thinks we’re not home. We use crating only at night. This won’t be practical in the winter, but, we’re hoping that by then she can be left in a room inside. We could also crate her, and come home during the day (we both work 5 minutes from home so we can come home at lunches).
However, we want her to be an inside dog, but we can’t always keep an eye on her all the time right now to make sure she’s not peeing somewhere; we’re moving in, cooking dinner, and what have you. Our basic technique is when we come home or get up in the morning, let her see us (we’re working on having her not bark, and she pretty much just sits by the door now), then, go outside with her, let her get excited and greet her. After that, we try to have her go to the bathroom. She is pretty good about doing this most of the time. Then, we bring her in. After an hour or so, we take her out again.
We are really working with the words “No”, “Inside”, “Outside”, and “Potty”. She seems to no “No” and “Potty” (not that she always listens).
There have been very few accidents with this method, but we’re having a couple of problems:
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How do we teach her to “ask” to go outside? It’s basically always us prompting her.
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She seems to associate her command to go to the bathroom (potty) with peeing. We’ve let her have some outside time after dinner, and there have been only a couple of nights with accidents in the crate, and once was pooping. But, we don’t know how to get her to know that “potty” means poop too.
Everything we read indicates Bassets are among the most difficult to train. She does not seem to exhibit too much stubbornness (except for liking to sneak away and grab your shoes). She seems eager to please for the most part.
Any suggestions? This is our first dog so we are really trying to train her right.