Puppy Potty Training - Need Advice
Hi Reddit,
My wife and I are on three weeks with our new puppy. He's a 13 week old Shih Tzu. Things have been going mostly well, but we're having some trouble with housebreaking him. I'll give some more details about our setup with him now.
I work in an office about 45 minutes away from home, but my wife works from home every day. Our puppy has been great about sleeping in his crate and at this point will sleep from about 10:00pm till 6am when we wake up just about every day. He sleeps in a crate in our bedroom and seems to have no issues with his crate. We also have a crate in our living room for him which he also uses, but mainly for naps during the day.
When he's not in a crate, my wife has a pen in her office full of toys, chewies, water, etc. She will spend as much time playing with him and let him out as often as she can during the day while she works. He also has another pen in our living room downstairs where we play with him. We also will let him play outside of the pen if he's just gone to the bathroom outside.
He's pretty good about going to the bathroom outside. We have only had two total poops in the house (none in a couple weeks,) but we are still getting at least one pee accident per day, even if we are letting him out every hour. He seems to pee whenever we let him out and I'm not seeing any signs of a UTI, he does a full pee, no discolor or anything like that.
While we try to take him out as much as possible, sometimes it simply isn't possible if my wife has 2-3 hours of meetings back to back and I'm not home. It sort of feels like he's made zero progress when it comes to house training. He doesn't alert when he needs to go out, we'll be playing and then all of a sudden he's squatting to pee, or he might just go while my wife isn't looking because she's turned around and facing the computer for work.
We have consulted with a trainer who recommended we do NOT give him food rewards for going to the bathroom outside. I can't quite wrap my head around this approach and I don't think I agree with it. I'm about to disregard this advise and reward him with chicken (he's obsessed with chicken) when he goes to the bathroom outside. We've had success training him to do other things already using chicken.
I guess I'm just looking for advise on if this is simply a very young puppy not being house broken yet, or if we're doing something wrong with potty training him.