Manners
How to teach a dog to be house-trained
Two clean weeks with normal freedom — and the dog signals or heads to the door when it needs out.
What “potty routine” actually means
In Proof this is a skill in its own right, because house training is schedule and payment, not scolding.
You’ll need: Enzyme cleaner — ordinary cleaners leave the smell-map behind
The stages
These steps are a draft pending review by a credentialed trainer. They describe standard positive-reinforcement marker training; the app carries the same notice on every session screen.
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Stage 1 — Schedule plus payday
Goal: Dog empties outside at predictable times, every success paid
- Out after waking, after eating, after play, and every couple of hours besides. Same door, same spot.
- Stand still and be boring. The instant the dog finishes, mark and pay right there — not back inside.
If it goes wrong
- Caught mid-accident? Interrupt gently, straight out, pay outside. Clean with enzyme cleaner and say nothing — scolding just teaches hiding.
- Does everything outside except the thing, then goes indoors? You came in too early. Ten boring minutes out; the payday only exists out there.
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Stage 2 — Stretching the intervals
Goal: A week clean with normal household freedom
- Supervision or the crate between trips — every unnoticed accident trains the wrong habit.
- Stretch the gap between trips slowly.
If it goes wrong
- A sudden regression in a trained dog? Vet first — rule out a urinary problem before you change any training.
- Accidents cluster in one far room? Close that door for a month. Distance from the den blurs the rules for young dogs.
How long does it take?
Most foundation skills reach their bar in two to four weeks of short daily sessions. Adolescence can temporarily un-stick anything, which is normal.
Proof does not put a timeline on an individual skill, and neither should anything else — the honest answer depends on the dog in front of you, how often you practise, and where you practise. What it does instead is measure: every session records how many reps landed, so progress is a number rather than a feeling.
Proving it in 3 different places
A behaviour that only works in the kitchen is situational, not trained. Potty routine counts as proven in Proof once it clears the bar above at the top stage in 3 genuinely different contexts:
- Indoors — the quiet room where everything works
- Garden — outdoors, but home turf
- Street — pavements, traffic, passing people
- Park — other dogs, long grass, real distraction
- Somewhere new — a place the dog has never worked before
Proof also expires. Leave a proven skill for two months without asking for it and it returns to the daily plan as a refresher, because that is what actually happens to trained behaviour.