Coming home from a busy day at work and the last thing you want to do is train your dog, but as I talked about in part I, patience & consistency is key.
After dinner, I would take my dog for a 20 to 30 minute walk. This nightly walk made the biggest difference for me for 2 reasons. Because my dog was tired, he slept through the night and because he slept through the night, I eliminated any accidents at night!
Now comes bed time, I purchased a dog crate & a dog bed. Yes, my dog does use his dog crate but not for the reason I mentioned in part I. I trained my dog to see the dog crate as a positive thing by doing the following:
- I put his dog bed and a blanket in his dog crate. After a long walk, he is tired and is glad to have his own space to rest and not be bothered by my two year old or my cat.
- During the day, the door to his dog crate is always open so he has access to his dog bed.
- I never use his dog crate as a form of punishment. (i.e putting him in his crate if he's had an accident.) He now sees his dog crate as his own personal space to rest.
There were still nights when I only had 10 to 15 minutes to spare for the walk. On these nights, I took special precautions by closing his dog crate door before going to bed. This way, my dog couldn't just walk out and do his business in the house. If the dog really needed to go, he would whine for me to let him out.
Now let's talk about Dog health problems.
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