Can I train my dog to use bells if I can’t hear them sometimes?

[donwetzel]

Hello everyone! I’d like to start teaching my almost 6 y/o dog to use bells for when he’d like to go potty. He currently will whine and kinda stand by the door but with changing my medications recently I fear I’ll sleep through those signals. He also only does it if it’s a RIGHT NOW kinda thing but I’d like it to be also if he’d just like to go out. The issue I see with this has to do with my current living situation so I’ll outline that real quick. I live with my parents and their younger kids I’m their house. My parents have a dog that is aggressive towards female dogs but has gotten along with male dogs before. My dog is a male dog but we aren’t going to try them together again until we find a reliable trainer who can help with that. So that means that she gets the main house and my dog gets the basement where I live (I have a studio apartment set up). We will lock their dog up some times in a bed room to let my dog come up and say hi to the rest of the family and have some time, and then we let each other know when one of the dogs are outside and just switch them around for play/potty time. I do spend quite a bit of time in the basement or outside with one of the dogs but I do come up stairs some to visit with my family (mainly evening) and when I do this I can’t really hear anything in the basement unless my dog is crying (normally for dinner) I’m worried that if I start teaching him to ring bells to go potty that if he does that and I’m upstairs and can’t hear him it’ll cause him to get confused and not use them anymore. Are the bells a bad idea then if I can’t hear them upstairs? Also if I’m in the process of training and he uses them but we have the other dog up so we need to put her inside will the time it takes to get him outside deter him from using the bells again?

 

[one12man]

@donwetzel You can get touch pad door bells on Amazon where the speaker is portable. Dog touches pad, speaker makes a sound. You will be able to have the speak upstairs with you.

 

[twinflame]

@donwetzel Watch this and to anyone else, check out Nates other videos, he's really clear and intuitive, and not bad on the eye either from what my lady friends tell me...

Its a quick tutorial on how to teach your dog to ring a bell, but it applies to any object.

Nate Schoemer - teach your dog to ring a bell

 

[annaliseh]

@donwetzel I can only tell you my experience, but maybe it is useful: my dog rings a bell on the door to go out. If I don't immediately respond (like when I know he's just bored and want to go out), he'll sit by the door and wait. If I am calling his bluff, sometimes I don't respond and eventually he gives up and does something else. This has never persuaded him from ringing the bell further.

 

[pravda]

@donwetzel I learned that just because my dog learned to ring the bell to go out, she wouldn’t know to ring a bell to come in, especially if the ring is in a different spot.

 

[donwetzel]

@pravda That won’t be an issue! We can’t leave either of the dogs outside so any time their outside then we’re outside and let them know when to come in

 

[but_first_coffee]

@donwetzel I've lived in a dog rotation type situation, and we always just default to proactively letting the dogs out at regular intervals to use the bathroom, instead of waiting until one indicated it had to go out and then scrambling to get the other dog situated. We were dealing with true unmitigated aggression (my roommate had a pitbull that we're 90% sure was directly from a game dog bust, and there was a young child in the home), so there was a very strict process making sure the dogs were properly managed. If you're not in the position to respond to your dog's requests to go out in a timely fashion, whether its whining or bell ringing, it's probably best to implement some sort of potty schedule instead.

 

[vdenni]

@donwetzel To me it seems way easier to just do scheduled bathroom breaks. Let your dog out before you come upstairs to be with your family.

I’ve had over a dozen dogs and never trained any to a bell. Dogs I know that are bell trained start to do this all the time out of boredom. I just take them out 4 times a day at the same times (two of those times are long walks). If they need more (very rarely), they do the wining thing like your dog. I’d just set alerts on your phone. But this is my personal preference.