Pet gates are absolute lifesavers for dog owners (and in the case of housetraining young puppies, carpet savers too!)
Gates keep dogs confined to one room or one area of the house, usually an area that has easy-to-clean floors. Most pet gates are actually baby gates doing double duty by keeping both the dog and the baby in a confined, safe area.
Your local pet supply store or online retailer has these gates but you also can get them at a baby supply shop or large toy store chain. If you look at the pictures on the box, you'll often see a dog on one side and a baby on the other.
Though gates are a great investment, people often use them inappropriately, making housetraining a longer ordeal than necessary. Confining your dog to an area where it's OK to have a potty accident doesn't mean that he should have free reign to take a wizz anywhere he wants.
Gates can help confine your dog in a particular area and save you from having to follow him around the house to supervise him. But leaving him alone in a gated area is not always wise because he may get into trouble and become destructive, or have an accident inside the gated area. The key is that a gate is most helpful after your pup's bladder is already empty.
Great Assets
Pet gates are also great assets when housetraining because they enable you to limit how much access a puppy can have to the house, which is good for all aspects of training.
It always helps to train a puppy if you can look at things from his point of view. Puppies enter life in their new homes with no concept of the difference between outside and inside. For them, the house is their whole world and so anywhere away from their immediate sleeping area or den is fair game to do as nature intended.
So, if you initially give a puppy free, unsupervised access to a whole house or even a room, then getting the hang of housetraining will be more difficult.
As your puppy grows and you start to introduce him to the outside world through a combination of repetition, reward and perhaps following an adult dog it there's one in the home, he develops the concept of the house being his den rather than just a small area and he naturally seeks the outside to use as a bathroom.
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