Have Reasonable Expectations for Housebreaking a Dog: Part 1

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Elise McMahon for Expert Village.com and in this video series we are talking about house training your dog. If you would like to find out more about my services, you can visit my website at canineheadstart.com. So when we are talking about house training your puppy. If you’ve got a puppy that you are trying to teach how to live in the house without making messes. We got a little puppy here. She is about 6 months old. This is Raven and we want to talk about reasonable expectations. What is a reasonable expectation for you to have in terms of how long a puppy can hold it? So a generally accepted rule here is that a puppy can hold it, if you take the number of months they are and add one. So if you have a 2 month old puppy, add 1 and that is 3 hours. If you have a 5 month old puppy, add 1 that is 6 hours. So during normal active periods of time a 5 month old puppy ought to be able to hold it for 6 hours. However, you still want to keep in mind that if your puppy just wakes up you should need to get it right out. I would say by 5 months a puppy should sleep through the night. This one here is just turning 6 months. She has been sleeping through the night since she was about 4 months old. But you want to keep in mind reasonable expectations and not think that a 2 month old puppy is going to be able to sit in a crate for 8 hours while you are at work. If you are going to be at work for 8 hours and you got a 2, 3, or 4 month old puppy, you really need to arrange to have someone come in during the middle of the day to let the puppy out at least once or twice for a potty break. "