Teaching the Dog to Go Outside

Classical Conditioning is learning to associate two stimuli and to anticipate an event.

Recently I got a dog. We have been trying to train her to go to the bathroom outside, because she would always go to the bathroom on the carpet, and I would have to clean it up, which I hated. First we started trying to crate train meaning that she would be in her crate all day and then when we came home from school/work, we would take her out and she could take care of her business outside. It was working for a while, but then we stopped crate training her and she was taking care of her business inside again. Then we had to go back to crate training and we would give her treats every time she would come back from her walk after going to the bathroom outside, but then she started to get fat. Nothing was working, but that's probably just because we hadn't been training her long enough.

Anyways, reason for me telling you this: As we were training her to go to the bathroom outside, my mom told me a story about her friend and how her friend trained her dog in a classical conditioning type of way . What m mom's friend did was that every time they would take the dog out for a walk and to go to the bathroom, they would take the dog's paw and tap it on a bell that was hanging on the door, which would make the noise. After a while the dog had learned to associate the bell and going to the bathroom. The dog learned to tap the bell when it needed to go outside to go to the bathroom.

When my mom told me about the dog, we had not learned about classical conditioning yet, so I just thought that it was a cool idea that the dog was able to do that after a while. After learning about classical conditioning, I actually understand what was going on with the dog while it was learning to go to the bathroom outside. Maybe we should try that on my dog and maybe she will stop going to the bathroom on all of our carpets.