How to Train Your Puppy to Pee Outside in 6 Easy Steps

1. Newspapers are Your Friends

Newspapers are the thing you absolutely have to have in your home when you get a new puppy. They will be of a huge help to train the puppy to pee outside.

Take a lot of newspapers and basically pad the floor of the room where your puppy is. Don’t put just one layer but rather 3-4. It is a good idea to remove the rugs from all the other rooms until your puppy becomes house trained. Your puppy will probably choose a certain place in the house where to pee. Of course, you don’t want this place to be in the house at all, and that’s where the newspapers come in.

Make sure to see where your puppy peed for the first time and take the last layer of those newspapers. Discard all the others. Now comes the second step.

2. Move the Newspapers Closer to the Door

Now that you have the last payer of the newspapers you puppy peed on, put it closer to the exit door of your house and cover it with clean newspapers. You can’t immediately put them by the door, especially if the door is too far away. You need to gradually move them closer.

What’s the catch you ask? Your puppy’s nose. Dogs can smell their own urine, you know they use it to mark their territory. Well, since your puppy is too small to actually be territorial, it will track the smell of its own urine to pee at the same place again. Even if those newspapers weren’t wet at all, dogs’ sense of smell is way better than ours.

With this method, you gradually move your puppy’s “toilet” closer to the exit door, and in one moment, you will make it out.

3. Monitor the Puppy

You can start doing this right from the start, but it can prove to bring more harm than good in the beginning. The point is to monitor your puppy closely to see when it prepares itself to pee. As soon as you see it lifting a leg, or crouching (puppies actually learn to lift a leg when they’re a little older) gently tap it on the butt, say “no” and take it out to do the business.

Now, you can see the flaw in this plan if you start too early. If your puppy is located far away from the exit door, you risk a couple of rooms and your own pants with doggy pee. But this can work quite fine once you get your puppy’s “toilet” closer to the door.

Extra advice: If you puppy succeeds to pee on the rug or anywhere else in the house, make sure you clean that right away. It’s best to use vinegar or lemon juice for cleaning, because they can efficiently mask the smell of the pee, so the doggy doesn’t come back to the same place.

4. Put a Bell on the Door

I actually learned this trick from a professional dog trainer. Buy a small bell in a store and hang it on the exit door. It needs to be lower, so that your puppy can reach it with its muzzle.

Whenever you take your puppy outside to pee, ring the bell. After a while, the puppy will start associating the ringing sound with going out. This means it will learn to ring the bell when it needs to go out.

5. Give an Encouraging Cheer

Dogs respond to praises, so if you want to train your puppy to pee outside, it is quite a good idea to award it with a praise every time it succeeds.

Take the puppy out and as soon as it is done with its business, say “good doggy” and pet it. The puppy needs to associate peeing outside as being good whereas peeing indoors means bad.

6. Don’t Give Your Puppy too Much Water

This of course doesn’t mean that you should leave the puppy thirsty, just don’t give it too much water. Puppies actually don’t have control over their sphincter, they can’t hold the pee in. This function develops when they grow up a little.

This is also a reason why you shouldn’t yell at your puppy when it does pee in the house, it’s just because it couldn’t hold it anymore. It doesn’t do it with the purpose to annoy you.

Training you puppy to pee outside comes down to two words – patience and persistence. It’s not rocket science, but you need to give it some time.