Bell toilet training

[Chinchi]

Has anyone taught their sheltie to ring a bell when they need to go out to the toilet?

I thought it would be a good idea to teach Darla as she is so quiet and doesn't make a noise to tell us she needs to go, but my partner thinks she will treat it like a toy and just ring it constantly for attention or for runs outside.

I must admit, when we have a treat in our hands she will run through all her tricks before we even tell her to do something for it, just in case one of those things is correct and she gets the treat. So she may just treat the bell in the same way and ring in case she gets some reward from it.

She is house trained btw.

Any thoughts?

 

[dblock]

I don't have a yard, so it wouldn't work for me, but, I've herd of other people doing it with no bad outcomes, just make sure if you use a reward, you reward her after she goes so then she'll know what you want

 

[Cindy]

I have string of bells by my door.
gavin totally understands they are for 'going out for potty'.
his signals are, in order.
standing at the door, if that doesn't work after a few minutes then,
staring at me, that one he will do for a good while before moving on,
whining while staring at me, which he does when I'm sleeping,
ringing the bell

by the time we get to ringing the bell, it is 'I really need to go out NOW' and not in 5 minutes. And thank god for the bells cause I can travel with them and put them on the door for going out (don't do now, but when he was younger I did)

I do not have a yard, so we have to go down a short flight of stairs to some grassy areas. when he was a pup, there were some false alarms. and what I call 'pity pees' where he really didn't have to go but wanted out and made a token pee so I wouldn't get mad at him. but now he's really pretty good about it.

 

[Shelby's mom]

We originally taught Shelby to ring the bells to go out. It worked wonderfully. We got tired of hearing the bells and she had learned to whine when she had to go out so we stopped using them.

But they really did help a lot with house training.

 

[BarbV]

I know alot of people use them successfully. And I sell them in my pet store.

I personally don't like them and my reason is because I bring my dogs around to the cottage, to my parents house, etc. I don't want to have to bring bells with me everywhere I go.

By the same token, I've never had a problem with my dogs telling me that they want to go outside.

I'm trying to remember doggy training 101 but the only thing I remember is looking for visual cues....that is, dog circling, restless, whining. Then I would ask "Outside????" and the dogs would run to the back door.

Every morning the dogs have two directions....right to the dog dish, left to the back door. If I say "Outside" they go left. If I say "dinner" they go right!

 

[Eagle]

Do you have more than one dog?

This is what happened when I tried it, I probably just didn't handle training two dogs correctly to it.

I adopted a female adult dog who was not housebroken. She was getting good at pottying outside when I took her out, but never asked to go out. I thought teaching her that if she rang the bell I would take her out might help.

I had a second dog, a male, who I had gotten as a pup who was housebroken and very good about telling me when he had to go out.

I never got past the ring the bell and we will go out and get a treat stage. The male learned extremely quickly that he could ring the bell and I would take them both outside and give them both a treat. The female, who was the one I wanted to learn, had not rung the bell once yet. I did not want to up the criteria for the male yet (i.e. you only get a treat if you potty) because I was taking them both out when the bell was rung and she had not started ringing it yet.

Well, the male decided this was great. He would ring the bell, I would take both dogs out a give them a treat, we would come in, and he would ring the bell again, etc, etc.

I probably should have taken only the dog who ran the bell out so that I could up the criteria appropriately for each dog individually, but they were used to going out together and I was thinking she would learn by watching him do it.

Bottom line, he trained me quickly.