How to stop accidents at night??

[LucieLiu]

Hello All

Looking for some advice - my dog Lola (15 months) has not yet mastered lasting through the night without peeing on my floor, in my house. I say my house, as when she stays at my parents house or is with her dog sitter, she never has any accidents!!
I used to put paper down for her until she was about 12 months - this is too long I realise. When she comes back, she does not have any accidents for the first night but will after that.

How do I get her to stop as she is well able to hold out for the night? Is it linked to her scent in that room?

Thanks for your replies

[Dublin]

maybe she can still smell her pee on the floor - you could try cleaning the floor with biological washing powder, then when the floor is dry feed her on that floor.

a trainer told me to do this when I had the same problem & it worked right away!

[Karlin]

Just as background -- many trainers now say never to use training pads or papers -- it means you basically have to housetrain your dog twice, once to go on pads, then all over again to go outside. It is much easier to start as you wish to finish and train a dog to go outside from day 1.

Yes, I agree with your thought -- by waiting so long and letting her use papers for a full year, you have trained your dog that she is to go inside on the floor, unfortunately. This is a full year of ingrained, trained behaviour now and will be harder to change so you will need a lot of patience (and no punishment!). You now need to start all over. I'd go out and buy Shirlee Kalstone's book on housetraining, clean as noted previously with an enzymatic cleaner or biological washing powder solution, use a crate perhaps.

One way of helping this would be to not keep her at night any longer in that room where she associates always going, but put her somewhere else in another room, either penned or crated inside. If crated, realise you need to crate train first -- you can't start sticking a dog in a crate that isn't trained to use one or the process will backfire and she will be very stressed and the problem may become worse.

There are posts on crate training/housetraining in the Library section under Caring for your Cavalier.

[shippers]

I sympathise with this as our puppy was getting into the same habit although she is only 15 weeks. We have had new wooden flooring put down on Monday so we needed to stop this habit as soon as possible. We had originally been using puppy pads and soon realised that we were providing a place to pee on the floor and Lois thought this was the place to pee. I had always been against crates thinking it was cruel to put a puppy in a cage but I bought one as a lat resort. I have to admit I am a total convert. Lois absolutely loves her crate and sees it as her den. She happily goes in it at night time and will sleep 8 hours and no accidents. I would definitely recommend getting a crate just big enough as a bed so no room to walk around in it and pee (a dog wont soil its bed). Obviously the dog will have to be trained to use it by feeding treats and chew toys inside the crate and making it their comfy space. We don't leave lois in her crate for long periods during the day but it is very helpful overnight and when the workmen were laying our new flooring.

[Tania]

Using Biological Washing Powder worked for us, great suggestion. We had problems with Dougall during the night, so we set our alarm clock at say 2am for a few nights, then moved the alarm forward half an hour each night so he associated going for a pee with the alarm. It takes a couple of weeks but its worth a try if it solves the problem. When we took him out in the middle of the night we moved the puppy pad outside. If I had to train a puppy again, I won't use them. Hope this helps.

[rhiannasmom]

We've used pee pads to train Amber, and I'm quite pleased with them. Perhaps she has taken longer to train (she's 8 months old today, and we're not done yet!) but I'm happy to give her a proper place to relieve herself if we don't pick up on her "I've gotta go!" behavior. We also placed a string of bells at the back door for her to ring if she needs to go outside, but she uses them to tell us she has to go play instead.

One thing I would recommend if you do decide to go with pee pads is to have a dedicated area of the house for the pads and start out with them on top of a tarp. I tried a shower curtain liner but her little nails poked holes into it and I wound up with pee UNDER the pad on the carpet. I began with multiple pads in that spot (for a large target area) and gradually made it smaller. I also would use a clean pad to soak up pee from an accident on the carpet before I cleaned it upwith the enzyme cleaner... this allowed her scent to be on the pad. It helped alot when she was first trying to figure it all out!

Good luck with whatever method you use!

Melissa