house training a Shih Tzu puppy

Shih Tzu puppies can be slow to house train but with patience and perseverance you can do it. Puppies need to be taken out at least every two hours and immediately after waking up or resting, after eating and after playing or excitement. Owners need to go out with the puppy, not shut the puppy out alone. Eliminatory behaviour is self-rewarding, but it will help to praise and give rewards for going in the right place.

Watch out for signs that the puppy wants to go when in the house and take the puppy out at once.

If you have to go out or cannot concentrate on the puppy, leave it in a play pen that has a bed and a toilet area. The toilet area should be covered with polythene and newspaper or you can use puppy pads available from pet stores etc.

At night time either take the puppy up to your bedroom and confine it to a small area, getting up to take it out when it wakes, or leave it downstairs in a puppy playpen, getting up to take it out when you hear it make a noise.

Dogs hate to soil their bed/nest so the process of trying to teach your puppy that the whole of the house is your nest should be quite easy

Things that can go wrong are:

Owners fail to go outside with puppy
The puppy finds itself outside and tries very hard to get back to the security of indoors with its parental figure. It does not concentrate on going to the toilet. Since it became excited when outside, it is likely to want to go when it comes back in and usually ends up learning to go on the carpet.

Owner picks up puppy whenever it attempts to go in house
The puppy does not learn where to go when it needs to relieve itself. Puppies who have been raised in this way will be okay if someone thinks for it, but will have no idea of how to get to the toilet if one is not provided.

Owners punish the puppy whenever it goes in house
The puppy learns that it is potentially dangerous to go in front of owners and so will hide away when it needs to go.

Owner leaves puppy in house alone for too long
If left in a cage, the puppy may learn to soil its bed. If left free in the house, it may learn to soil the carpet.

Dogs learn to seek out a particular type of surface to go on (e.g. concrete, grass etc). When they need to go, they will try to find a patch of this, e.g. newspaper if paper trained for a long time, concrete if kept in kennels during early life. Teaching a dog to be clean in the house is often about teaching them to select a different surface to the one they have been used to.

Remember to praise and reward your puppy when he goes in the right place.

Copography (eating faeces) Distasteful as it seems to most humans, eating stool is normal for dogs. (New mothers, for example, will eat the stool of puppies, presumably to keep the nest clean. Puppies, in turn, will sample whatever they come across including stool. Human babies explore with their hands, and puppies explore with their mouths.

Nearly every dog will occasionally sample stool but some have a real craving for it, including their own, and will eat it every chance they get. When a dog eats his own stool he is giving the partially digested food another run through his digestive tract where more nutrients will be absorbed.

In some cases, dogs will eat stool merely because they don't have enough to do or they will do it because it is a way of getting your attention. They will also eat stool as a way of establishing their dominance over other pets by removing their scent markers.

The cure is easy, pick it up before your puppy can eat it!