Hi, I am a first time dog owner and I have had my chocolate Labrador puppy for three nights now..she is 10 weeks old and I have zoned off an area in my house with baby gates and the area is quite big I keep the puppy’s bed in there, some toys and a toilet pad.during the day she is mostly outside in the garden and at night I keep her in this zone inside the house. She is generally well behaved and she has no problem staying in this gated zone where she naps during the day as well..the only issue I have is that she wakes up in the middle of night several times crying and barking wanting to go outside to pee and/or play..she refuses to use the pad in the gated zone even though it’s not very close to her bed..my question is should I ignore her need to go outside in the middle of the night to force her to use the toilet pad indoors or do I have to take her out regularly at night?. Needless to say I would rather have uninterrupted sleep so I would prefer to train her use the pad indoors but her crying at night breaks my heart so I have been waking up to take her outside..any advice would be much appreciated.
Do not go to her during the night! I have raised a lot of lab puppies and know that they learn FAST! If you go to her you are reinforcing her barking and whining behavior. It may take 4-7 days of her continuing to try to get you to come to her but have no fear it will end. Get yourself a good set of earplugs and ride it out. It will be worth it and she will learn who is in control
A tiny puppy cannot hold it's bladder all night. Unless you really want to train the puppy to toilet inside (which is then going to be a real challange to change that rule when you decide that you don't like your dog toileting in the house anymore!), then you HAVE to get up during the night to let it out. Don't wait for the pup to whine; set your alarm, get up and take her outside. Having a puppy isn't easy.
IMHO pads are a bad idea. Get up and and take her out, preferably before she whines. It won't take too many weeks before she can make it all night.
She sounds a clever dog who wants to toilet outside, seems a shame to force her otherwise. I have always woken up and taken my dogs out over night, it’s not for long and worth it as they train really fast. I don’t really understand the logic of using pads and encouraging dogs to toilet inside, it goes totally against your desired end result.
Wow, you’re so lucky to have such a clever puppy! We had to keep our puppy in for ages as we had to delay her vaccinations and we have loads of foxes living around here and didn’t want to take the risk. We are now having to retrain her to go outside which is harder than you’d think! She is getting there but it involves a lot of standing about in the cold waiting for her to do something when she clearly wants to go back indoors. She’s currently also refusing to toilet on her walks so we have to take her straight to the back garden when we get home where she will go straight away For what it’s worth, the night wakings may not last long anyway as our 13 week old has been sleeping midnight to 7am without any toilet wake ups for a couple of weeks now.
