KarthikMuthuswamy

To add some context about my pup: he is a four-month old Golden retriever. I've been crate training for the past three weeks. He sleeps (without peeing) in the crate from 9:30 at night (last potty break) until 6:30 (first potty break) in the morning. However, during the day, he drinks water regularly (water bowl kept outside the crate) and pees in the crate without much warning. We have a large crate but we've created a separation that makes it small enough to move around but not walk around the crate. P.S.: Sorry for the separate posts, the forum was complaining of an SQL injection attack in my text and I had to split the texts to make it possible for me to post this here.

Hello dog lovers, My questions are: I read that puppies do not like to potty where they sleep. However, my pup does not seem to care! He pees and simply lies in the pee around him, sometimes even making him soaking wet (that I have to wash him with water to ensure he does not smell of his pee). Is this normal behaviour? With this behaviour, we've not kept any clothing or bedding inside the crate as we might have to wash one every 3 hours or so. His crate is simply the base plastic that it came with. When he finishes pooping and peeing, I leave him in a playpen with some toys. However, he would pee in the playpen when we miss looking at him for even a few seconds. This behaviour is completely baffling me! The good thing is he warns me with yelping if he wants to poop or drink water. I regularly take him out around every two hours and after his meal times. How could I possibly teach him to warn me before peeing? Would teaching him to ring a bell to potty help here? Any suggestions would be great here! Thanks, Karthik

Thank you very much for all the information. I'm able to slowly wean him away from his biting and jumping using treats. I divert his attention to something else when he tries to nip and that seems to work most times. I'll keep working on this and get him to completely move away from nipping.

He usually bites his leash a lot after coming back from a walk perhaps signaling me to remove it. When I try to remove it he tries to bite my hand as well. This is one example but there are several occasions where he is nippy and I’m unable to correct this behavior. This also happens when I teach him to stop jumping and results in him still jumping more. Any ideas or suggestions would be really helpful. Thanks!

Hello dog lovers, I am training my pup by following the steps to address jumping. However, my 4-month old pup has this weird method of biting when I turn around to stop his jumping. When I try to remove him from biting my legs or pants, he begins to bite my hands. Due to this, I keep him mostly inside his crate after his train, food and walk schedule. Any ideas to fix his biting behaviour? I believe I should be able to fix his jumping once his biting subsides. Thanks!

This is super useful information. I did do some research on stuffing Kong but seem to have missed this. Thanks a ton for this info! I did give Nacho a stuffed Kong and he just went wild with it. He eats food too fast on a food bowl and I feel Kong is able to regulate his food intake and keep him occupied.

Hi Adrienne, I'm sorry to hear Einstein passed away, I did not know that. Thank you very much for sharing this video. This provides a much clearer approach to follow. Would be really cool if you could post links to videos for all the other commands as well. I'll try to train Nacho similar to how you did and post a video of how the training went. Thanks!

Thank you, Adrienne, for the detailed answer. This is quite fascinating and really useful information to know for new dog owners (especially first time owners). He does seem to have fun eating stones and grass and does not seem to be doing it out of the blue. Moreover, it has been barely a week since I got the pup and I noticed such an eating pattern since the first day I took him walking around the backyard. I did setup an appointment with my local vet and he too mentioned that grass eating is quite common amongst puppies but he suggested me to ensure he does not eat too many stones and a lot of grass. The vet was quite happy with the health of the pup. He will be conducting a detailed stool test to get a better status of the health of the pup. I've been training my pup to leave it and drop it but he does not seem to learn it either in a non-distracting environment nor in an environment like the backyard. I will keep pushing him to learn these two important commands for his own safety. Do you have any videos of how you teach these commands to Einstein? I seem to follow your instructions for each command but the results are not really satisfactory. Thanks!

Thank you very much. I've indeed got a Kong toy for my pup but I'm a bit confused about how to use it. I read that I have to give each meal to the pup in the Kong as a frozen food but I'm not sure how to do it. Should I soak his food in water and put it in the Kong and freeze it? Is that the right method to give a Kong toy to the pup? Thanks!

Hi Adrienne, Thank you for your detailed answers. I has been quite a busy few days training my pup that I could not touch my laptop. I've attached a few pics of my Golden Retriever with this post. I managed to get him to sleep the entire night and go potty outside on most occasions. We do have a peeing "accident" per day in our living room but I'm hoping to get that fixed very soon. Like you mentioned, he has such accidents exactly the second I take my eyes off him. In such cases, I do use a mixture of water, apple cider vinegar and essential oil in the areas where he pees and finally an enzyme based cleaning solution to make it smell good. We give him Royal Canin Golden Retriever Junior three times a day (07:30, 12:30 and 17:30), and I take him out to potty about half an hour after he eats. I also make sure that he empties his bladder before he goes into his crate and after he gets out. I make his potty time as boring as possible to make sure he knows I mean business. I do use "potty" as a keyword and it seems to have an effect. We have a playpen around his crate where most of his peeing accidents happen and usually just after a training session or play session. Twice a day, I take him for a walk to get him tired out, especially before going to sleep at night. One question I have is, what type of chew toys can I leave in his crate, so that he isn't bored sitting inside? At the moment, he has an AniOne Stick which we get here in Germany. I read that keeping Nylabones inside his crate for his chewing might be dangerous for him if he bites off too much. Any other suggestions?

Hello fellow dog lovers. My four-month old Golden retriever seems to like to follow scent trails on walks. However, I notice that he picks up small stones in his mouth, crunches and eats them. I feed him around 60 gms of his dog food three times a day. Do dogs eat stones? Is this a sign of deficiency? Any ideas on discouraging him to eat stones?

Hello fellow dog lovers, I got a four-month Golden Retriever a couple of days back and I started training him using your techniques. He learns new commands quite easily and he is able to perform them in different settings. However, I'm unable to get him trained to poop or pee outside consistently. He did both outside yesterday, but this morning I stayed outside with him for close to an hour slightly playing and walking with his scent trail and yet he came into is crate to poop and peed in his play pen while I was cleaning the crate. Any suggestions to fix this issue? Am I doing something wrong here? Can you share some pooping guidelines for 4-month olds? Thanks!