Toilet problem

[Murph]

Hi Guys,

Im wondering if you can help me with a little problem we are having with 7 month old Penny. She has been house trained for some time and we have had no issues at all. The back door is always open and she pops in and out of the house during the day to pee. Lately we have been giving her a bit more freedom around the house and i have caught her peeing on the beds a few times!!!!

She seems to now associate the beds in the house with peeing!! Obviously every time this happens we remove her from the bedroom and have to wash everything etc etc and its becoming a problem......We also keep the bedroom doors closed all the time but sometimes she manages to get in and up she jumps and pees immediately!!

Do any of you have any suggestion of how i can break this association with using our bed as a toilet??

Murph

[Karlin]

If she is peeing on beds, and more to the point, is able to escape from your sight and pee on beds, then she is being given too much freedom too soon. Keep the doors shut and don't allow a dog this young to wander through rooms where you don't know she is absolutely reliable. As this level of reliability and maturity generally doesn;t come til about one year of age, you really need to restrict her access until that point. Only allow her in such rooms when on a lead or carried by a family member and when under a hawk eye.

Puppies in particular like to pee on soft things like beds and carpets and they like to mark places like beds because they smell richly of family members.

Think too about what housebreaking is doing -- it is teaching dogs not to defecate/wee inside a house because we want the dog to view the house as its den, which dogs will naturally keep clean.

But a dog has no idea that a whole house is supposed to be its den -- it only learns bit by bit, room by room. YOU have to reinforce all the same housetraining rules as each new room is introduced. For a young dog, a whole house is simply too big and too overwhelming to register as its den. So it just goes when it has to go and finds it tempting in particular to mark out areas as its territory by weeing on them. Peeing on the place where you sleep is not unlike the behaviour where dogs will wee on top of spots where others have wee'd. It just thinks it is finding boundaries of your mutual territory and happily adds its urine to the other rich personal smells there -- the sweat and hormones etc that have seeped into the mattresses of everyone in the house.

In a sense you are expecting a toddler to know how to use the potty simply because it has used one a few times but it takes a long, long time for toddlers to stop needing nappies and then training pants. Dogs are the same, so you need to remember not to give them more responsibility than they can manage. Until she is very relaibly housetrained and around a year in age, have people keep their bedroom doors shut. And also keep in mind that it is very hard to get the wee odours that the dog can smell out of a mattress as they will seep very deeply in. You need to use an enzymatic cleaner designed for neutralising the things DOGS smell, not just what we smell -- most pet shops will carry these cleaners. Regular household cleaners generally will not work. You may even need to replace the mattresses if the urine has soaked well in as the odour will remain a lure to a dog to go on the same place again (remember we use this habit of dogs to help housetrain them but getting them to go outside in the same place -- unfortunately it also works in ways we don;t want so a dog needs to be very carefully managed so it cannot put down these scnet markers).

[Murph]

Hi Karlin,

Thanks a million for your reply. I guess you are right, she is just too young to be given access to the whole house. She usually stays in the kitchen, utility and back garden (which is quite a big area) but recently we started letting her go upstairs. She is now back in her area and im going to introduce her to other rooms on a room by room basis over time. I suppose we expected too much of her at such a young age.

Thanks again,

Murph.

[Murph]

Hi Karlin,

Thanks a million for your reply. I guess you are right, she is just too young to be given access to the whole house. She usually stays in the kitchen, utility and back garden (which is quite a big area) but recently we started letting her go upstairs. She is now back in her area and im going to introduce her to other rooms on a room by room basis over time. I suppose we expected too much of her at such a young age.

Thanks again,

Murph.

[merlinsmum]

Karlin is quite right. We were lucky with Merlin, he was house trained by about 8 months but it wasn't until he was 1 we let him have the front room, stairs and kitchen - just or an hour or two at the time. He now ( 1 yr and 7 months) gets our bedroom and the bathroom too.

He doesn't get the spare room as there are too many wires and stuff and the attic room he doesn't get because he can see through the velux window at the birds and barks constantly!

I will have to go back to just the kitchen when we get the new puppy......

[Moviedust]

Yep--ditto Karlin.

We had Cedar restricted first to her kennel, then an xpen, then one room, then three room (sorta great room type space) then limited to the main floor minus bedrooms and the only carpeted room. She had just been given access to the carpet room (about one year old) when we introduced Willow, a mill rescue who was a few months older than Cedar but had little time to house train. We cut both girls back to the xpen.

So far, so good. We havent had many accidents at home at all. We have had issues with accidents at my folks, though, so we know Willow isnt associating all houses with no-no places yet. So we just take it step by step.