Godiva Gets Potty Trained (By Jove, I Think She’s Got It)

The alleged point of this blog is to document our dogs’ events for future amusement or to use as a learning tool. Say the event is that our puppy is now potty trained. Now say that we got a puppy somewhere down the line (not in the near future, thank you). We could then go back to our blog and find exactly how we accomplished potty training with our previous puppies.

Guess what? You’ll never guess. Not in a million years. Give up? Godiva is potty trained. Unless we ignore her for hours on end, she does all her potties outside now. When she needs to go she either tries to get our attention and/or runs to the back door.

How did we do it?

Well…

/Crickets chirping

Uh, umm, ah…

/Scratches head

I guess it was, nope, wasn’t that…

/Stares blankly into space

I’m not really sure how it happened. It sure was not a planned coherent strategy brilliantly executed. It was likely more a bunch of random crap thrown together that somehow maybe worked. Kind of like Laugh In. So, what is this magical random crap?

• Reward the heck out of her: Whenever she did a potty outside, we immediately rewarded her upon going back inside. It sounds like in and of itself, this would work. It might. Except that we made it confusing. Being softies, we also rewarded her if Couper went outside to go potty and she went along. This sounds like the following, “Good boy Couper for going potty outside. Here’s your yummie. Well, you helped Godiva, you get a yummie too”. Strangely, this somehow led Godiva to believe that she deserved a yummie any time that she went outside. Stranger still, she wants to go outside a lot.
• “Encourage” her when she went potty inside. By encourage I mean, yell, point, say “bad girl”, stick her nose near the mess.
• Take her outside constantly and wait out there until she went potty so that the chances are better that she will go while out there rather than inside.
• Put down a pee pad in the kitchen and hope out of pure random luck she goes on it and likes it. This never really worked. She did hit it once or twice. Sometimes she came close. Usually she just chewed up the pad.

This, strangely, is the same way that Couper got potty trained. Amazingly, like Couper, Godiva demands to be watched while going so that she can be rewarded. Don’t normal people just send their dogs out and assume they went? Normal people are strange.