House training a dog in a Luxembourg apartment is harder than the standard advice assumes, because almost all of that advice is written for a house with a garden door. Here, every single opportunity costs a harness, a lift and a street door, and a puppy that needs to go now does not have ninety seconds.
It is entirely achievable. It just needs a schedule rather than good intentions, and a decision about what you do at three in the morning.
The schedule that does the work
A young puppy needs to go out after waking, after eating, after play, and roughly every hour in between. The often quoted guide for how long a puppy can hold on is about one hour per month of age during the day, which for a ten-week-old is very short indeed, and it is a maximum rather than a target.
Set alarms for the first fortnight. Most failures are not the dog's, they are a missed interval while somebody was on a call.
For an adult dog newly arrived in a flat, the schedule is looser but the principle is the same: frequent, predictable opportunities in the first fortnight, then extend.
Getting the reward right
Go outside with the dog, every time, and reward within a second or two of the dog finishing. Food, immediately, at the spot. Praise as you walk back inside teaches nothing, because a dog connects the reward to what it was doing a second ago, not to the trip as a whole.
Use a quiet, consistent phrase while the dog is going, and eventually it becomes a cue you can use before a car journey or at eleven at night in the rain, which is worth the two weeks it takes to build.
Keep the toilet trip and the walk separate at first. A puppy that learns that emptying itself ends the outing will learn to hold on in order to stay outside longer. Toilet first, reward, then the walk begins.
Two seconds is the window. If the reward arrives as you reach the front door, you have rewarded coming back inside.
The lift and the street door
Build the sequence deliberately, because it is where apartment training falls apart. Harness on inside the flat, not on the landing. Straight to the lift, no sniffing in the corridor. Out of the building without detours. If the puppy is going to have an accident somewhere, it will be in the lift, so carry a small puppy rather than walking it down for the first weeks if you can.
Keep a bag of cleaning supplies by the door: paper, enzyme cleaner, bags. The residents of your building will forgive a puppy once. They will not forgive a puddle left in the lift.
Accidents
Clean with an enzymatic cleaner, never with anything ammonia-based, which smells to a dog like urine and marks the spot as a toilet. Ordinary household cleaners remove the smell for you and leave it for the dog.
Do not punish, scold or do anything with the dog's nose. It does not teach a dog where to go, it teaches a dog that going in front of you is dangerous, which produces a dog that hides behind the sofa to do it. That is a far harder problem to fix than the original one.
If accidents happen in the same place repeatedly, block access to it for a few weeks, feed the dog there for a while, and go back a stage in the schedule.
Pads, grass patches and other shortcuts
Indoor pads and artificial grass trays solve a real problem for a dog on the fifth floor with a recovering owner, and they create a different one: you are actively teaching the dog that indoors is an acceptable place to go, and later you have to untrain it.
If you use them, use them as a temporary bridge with a plan and a date, keep them in one place, and move them progressively towards the door. For most households in this city, more frequent trips outside, including paid cover at midday, is the shorter route.
Nights
Put the crate or the bed beside yours for the first weeks. You will hear the puppy get up, which is the entire point: a puppy that wakes and asks gets taken out and gets it right, while a puppy in another room learns to go on the floor because nobody came.
Take them out with minimum fuss, no play, no conversation, straight back to bed. Expect several weeks of interrupted nights and expect it to end on its own.
When it is not a training problem
Go to the vet rather than back to basics if a house-trained adult dog starts having accidents, particularly with increased drinking, straining or blood. Urinary infections, kidney disease, diabetes and, in older dogs, cognitive change all present this way, and no amount of schedule fixes them.
Accidents only when the dog is left alone, alongside barking, pacing or destruction at the door, are a separation problem rather than a toilet problem, and they need the appropriate plan.
Older dogs simply need more frequent opportunities than they did at four, and a dog on certain medications may need far more. That is not a regression, it is a timetable that needs updating.
Realistic expectations
Most puppies are reliable somewhere between four and six months, with regressions during adolescence and during any period of upheaval such as a house move. Adult rescue dogs often take two to four weeks in a new flat, and a dog that lived outside or in a kennel may take longer, because it has never learned the concept at all.
The households that get there fastest are not the strictest. They are the ones where somebody was available to take the dog out often enough in the first fortnight, which in a working household usually means paid cover in the middle of the day rather than hope.
General information for dog owners in Luxembourg, not veterinary or legal advice. For your own dog, ask your vet, a qualified behaviourist or your commune. How this journal is written and checked.
Away from your dog all day?
PAWLY provides individual dog walks, home visits and overnight care in your own home, across Luxembourg City. Same walker every time, written report after every visit.
Keep reading
All Puppies articles
Puppy biting: the week everyone panics
The six o'clock biting hour is almost always exhaustion rather than energy.
A puppy's first six months: a routine that survives a working week
Everything you do in these months is either building a habit or building a problem. There is very little neutral ground.
Growing a large-breed puppy without wrecking its joints
Do not add calcium to a complete growth diet. The instinct to build a strong dog does the opposite.
