In addition, for a Pug to be well-behaved, he needs to respect his leader, which will cause him to want to listen. If a dog is punished in a way that causes fear, he will be afraid of his leader which is not the same as respecting him.
Proper discipline for potty training and chewing/nipping/ other actions involve 3 steps:
1) Limit.
If a Pug has full run of a house and access to everything in it, he will have so many choices that he's bound to do things wrong. With 4, 5 or 6 rooms to possibly pee or poo in, if he has to go, surely he will not automatically wait until he is taken out or go right over to pee pads. If he has access to laundry piles thrown on the floor, how will he know that those are not 'toys' left out for him? Here are some good guidelines to follow:
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Any time that a Pug puppy is not being very carefully watched, he should be restricted to a controlled area. One of the best methods is to use a quality portable indoor playpen that is large enough for toys, food &
water, a quality bed and pee pads. This should be placed in well-lit room that is commonly used by the family such as the kitchen or living room.
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For bathroom needs when a Pug is home alone, if the puppy is in his pen, he will not purposefully pee or poo on his toys, water & food bowls or bed, so if the only other area available is his pee pads, the Pug is more than likely to use them. In cases of a Pug moving the pad onto his bed (some do this as if it is a blanket) or chewing it up, it can help to 1) duct tape the pad securely in place (works with hardwood or linoleum floors) or 2) forgo the pad and simply place the gates in the kitchen where the floor is easy to clean or on top of an appropriately sized cut-out piece of linoleum (this can be purchased at a home supply store). Keep in mind that housebreaking is a temporary phase and by the age of 9 months or so, a puppy can hold his needs for 8 hours or so while you are at work.
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It IS important to NOT keep him in his pen too often when you are home… A Pug needs to roam the house and to inspect all of the (safe) objects in the house. If not, how else is he to learn right from wrong? However, this should be done with the owner as his guide and along with discipline methods as shown ahead.
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Limit what the Pug has access to. An email from an owner comes to mind that let us know that his young Pug puppy
that was in his teething phase, kept chewing his shoes. He had a collection of running shoes that he liked to place in a row near the front door for easy access when he'd leave the house. Any time that he turned his back on his Pug, the puppy would scamper over to the shoes and start chewing on them. The question was: how to discipline the puppy to stop doing that.
While he could have put a lot of effort into teaching the lesson between those shoes and toys and it would have eventually worked… it was a lot easier to simply move the shoes to a shelf or onto a stand-up shoe rack where they were no longer accessible. The lesson here is to choose your battles wisely, especially with a teething puppy. Not only should the house be puppy-proofed, all objects that can be tucked away, should be. Leaving a Pug with tons of chewing options aside from toys is the canine equivalent of letting a child loose in a candy store.
Non-movable objects such as furniture legs, that dogs for some reason love chewing on, can be sprayed with a safe deterrent spray; apple bitter works well for this.