Cockapoos are extremely clever dogs so training them can be easier than it can be with other breeds of dog.
How long should it take to toilet train a puppy?
I remember when we went to Pets at Home just before we brought Lottie home to pick up some puppy training pads. We got speaking to a lady who was there also buying the same training pads as us, and I remember her saying that her dog was 1 year old and she was still using them! I remember thinking to myself,
I really hope it doesn’t take us that long to toilet train Lottie!! Fortunately, it didn’t, it took a matter of weeks!
We started Lottie off with training pads inside of her puppy pen, and also had some in different locations in our kitchen and in our front room. (Lottie didn’t go upstairs in our house at this point so it was only downstairs we needed to worry about).
Lottie picked up almost instantly that she needed to go on the puppy pads with our encouragement(we also brought a spray from pets at home which you spray onto the pads and it lets off a scent to the dogs that encourages them to go to the toilet on the pads, and I think this helped)
Of course there were some accidents around the house which is to be expected, they can’t get it perfect straight away!
We tried not to tell Lottie off too much when she didn’t make it to the toilet on the pads but we made a point of telling her No, and taking her to the pads to show her this is where she should have gone.
Whilst we were using the puppy training pads, we were also encouraging Lottie to go to the toilet outside in the garden as much as we could.
We brought Lottie home in the summer so we were quite lucky that we could leave our back door open and she could go in and out of the house as much as she liked and she quickly marked her territory in the garden and found the spot she wanted to use to toilet!
This made such a difference for us, being able to give Lottie free access to the garden and she made the decision quite quickly by herself to go outside when she needed to go to the toilet.
We would always give her lots and lots of fuss when she would go to the toilet outside and give her a treat, so she would know that she’d done something good! (Lottie is 18 months old now and still expects a treat every time she goes outside to the toilet!)
In terms of toilet training, this is something that we didn’t struggle with much at all and I would say it took roughly around 8 weeks, with the help of the puppy pads and spray, lots of encouragement from us and lots of praise and treats when they do good!
We used these puppy training pads – https://www.petsathome.com/shop/en/pets/just-for-puppy-training-pads-100-pack
And this spray – https://www.petsathome.com/shop/en/pets/simple-solution-puppy-aid-training-spray-500ml
Puppy training course
When Lottie was around 12 weeks old, we took her to a 6 week puppy training course local to us. It was a puppy socialisation class, for puppies up to 6 months old.
There were only 6 puppies in the class which made it much more easy to focus!
The puppy socialisation class was to help puppies behave nicely around people and dogs in all situations.
We learnt about meeting and greeting other people and dogs in a calm manner, recall exercises and more.
There was a mixture of on lead and off lead training, with time at the end of the class for the puppies to play together.
We learnt a lot from these classes and would definitely recommend you do the same for
Your puppy especially if like us, you were not too familiar with training dogs.
The classes not only helped to train Lottie but helped to teach us how to train her too!
General commands to help train a puppy
Lottie will do anything for a treat! She is extremely driven by treats so we’ve always found it really easy to get her to pick up commands with the help of treats!
Here are some of the treats that we use for Lottie and have done since we first brought her home, as we have to be careful due to her allergies and these are the treats we have found she gets on best with –
Treats – https://www.petsathome.com/shop/en/pets/wagg-dog-training-treats-125gm
Treats – https://www.petsathome.com/shop/en/pets/wagg-low-fat-dog-treats-125gm
Treats – https://www.petsathome.com/shop/en/pets/wagg-dog-treats-bbq-bangers-125g
As I said before, cockapoos are very clever so with us putting in the time and effort to teach her the commands, she picked up the following within just a few weeks!
- sit
- Lie down
- Paw
- High five
- Stay
- Leave it (leave things alone for e.g food dropped on the floor!)
With persistence, consistency (it is really important to ensure all members of your family/ household are all training in the same way so as not to confuse the puppy) you should see results fairly quickly with a cockapoo!
