# When (if?) do people naturally toilet train themselves? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 11, 2002, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-if-do-people-naturally-toilet-train-themselves/131788 "2002-10-11T06:18:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![RexDart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b77776/32.png) [@RexDart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RexDart)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2002, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-if-do-people-naturally-toilet-train-themselves/131788/1 "2002-10-11T06:18:29Z")
OK, so I assume that wild humans, pre-civilization, didn’t just go around dropping waste products like horses. But we don’t pee to mark territory like dogs do. Still, I doubt we just let loose wherever we felt like it. So human beings must learn at some age to control such functions and just go around a bush or something. And at one point it must have been something instinctual and not a learned behaviour. There were no toilet-training books in the prehistoric times, no theories of punishment/reward, and no language for parents to teach in. So I guess I’m wondering, when does that acquired behaviour occur (and how) in humans? ---
**Author:** ![Joey\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/919ad9/32.png) [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2002, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-if-do-people-naturally-toilet-train-themselves/131788/2 "2002-10-11T07:02:56Z")
It seems that you, ghandi5569 and filmyak have teemed forces. It’s not that often that there’s three seperate posts about such closely related topics, especially when they all refer to toilets. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2002, 11:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-if-do-people-naturally-toilet-train-themselves/131788/3 "2002-10-11T11:49:14Z")
I think people naturally train themselves at an early age, because it’s uncomfortable to have stuff running down your legs and messing up your environment. This is essentially the claim of a doctor who champions what he calls something like “The $50 Toilet Training Weekend”. The idea is that you let your kids run around one weekend without pants. When they go, they hate the sensation, and quickly deveop the desire to go in one particular spot – the bathroom. The $50 pays for cleaning the spot on the carpet. This method may not make sense to the childless out there, but it certainly gave hope to **Pepper Mill** and I when we went through the apparently endless procedure of toilet-training **MilliCal** a couple of years back (as reported on these pages). She did learn, eventually. If cats and ferrets can learn to use a sandbox by themselves, and even dogs wait until specified times and places (you train a dog not to go in the house, after all, and it self-trains not to go in its own house), it’s no great stretch to see that people learn not to foul their own nest. I had heard reports that the Australian aborigines would often excrete right at the campfire, but I suspect those reports – they sound like the sort of horror tales about primitives that the conquering Europeans might come up with. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ccd318/32.png) [@John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Kentzel-Griffin)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2002, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-if-do-people-naturally-toilet-train-themselves/131788/4 "2002-10-11T15:01:13Z")
I think your question is flawed by a couple of implicit assumptions. You seem to be assuming that humans operate by learned behavior and not by instinct, and that without language and guide-books, behavior cannot be learned. Humans, like all animals have instincts. Humans, like most animals, teach their young “proper” behavior with or without formal language or books.