Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with housetraining

Housetraining a pup: Ready to just buy a couple of corks

stupidsexyFlanders — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:27:51 -0800

Another puppy housetraining question. She'll be 1yo in three weeks and she's still having accidents. help This is a labradoodle we got at about four months. The person who gave her to us told us she was housebroken. No. She peed and pooped everywhere. Including her bed (we don't crate her, her room is a small laundry room.) She has no problem peeing where she sleeps.

From the beginning we've given her regular, frequent walks, rewarded her for getting it done outside, kept her confined to small areas of the house, etc. Even with all this, she would do things like (after a long walk) pee right next to my wife in the kitchen, which is one of her confinement areas. If she escaped from the kitchen she'd run upstairs and pee there, often on someone's bed. Recently we thought we had her finally trained, as she hasn't had an accident in the house for a couple of months. Then 2 days ago she pooped on the first floor at 7 a.m. (after having been walked (and pooping) around midnight the night before). This morning (again, after a late night walk) she came upstairs and peed on my daughter's carpet. I feel like we're backsliding to some very bad old days and we're getting frustrated, although we love this dog.

She's been checked out by the vet and nothing physical is wrong. She was fixed about a month ago.

Any ideas? I'll try to answer questions to clarify things as necessary.

Stop pooping the second I'm not watching you!

dejah420 — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:46:10 -0800

Last week I rescued a 7week old lab (mix) puppy from the pound before she was put down. She's a sweet girl, but I can't seem to get her house trained. We've got a soft crate, we feed her on a regular schedule, I take her out every two hours. ...more if she looks like she's sniffing around. Just a few minutes ago, I took her out, she tinkled, we came back in. I took my eyes off her long enough to get something out of the freezer, and she peed and pooped on my Xmas tree rug. The training book I have says that you should never "bad dog" puppies when they do this...you should look disappointed and make them watch you clean it up.

Right at this moment, I'm a little frustrated with this approach. I don't want to have to crate her all the time that she's not eating or on a leash, but I can't dedicate my entire life to following her around either. (She has been seen by my vet, who said she's a perfectly normal puppy with no physical or obvious behavioral issues.)

Hope me HiveMind, you're my only help!

(P.S., I'm sure a lot of my current "OMFG!" frustration is because my parents are descending on me in a few hours, and my Mother, bless her heart, is a white glove inspector.)

What should we do to help make this apartment potty training experience work best?

gavia — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:33:38 -0800

How should we modify housetraining if we live in an apartment building? Nine days ago, we added a eight week Border Terrier to our pack (gratuitous puppy shots here). Everything is going as expected. Ollie (the puppy) is a great dog: smart and engaging and we enjoy discovering more of his personality each day. We've been working hard on housetraining and done a bunch of research. My partner and I have housetrained dogs before, but both time we were living in a house. My earlier puppy learned to signal that he needed to relieve himself by going to the door. Now, we live on the fifth floor of an apartment building. We're dutiful to pick Ollie up in our arms hourly, ask him "Is it potty time?" and walk him downstairs to the patch of grass outside the apartment building. We tell him to "Go potty" and he does. This is fantastic. He seems to get that this is where he needs to go "potty". There are accidents in the house (to be expected at his age and always of the urine variety). One of us picks Ollie up and take him outside, while the other cleans the accident up.

So, to the heart of my question. Because this is the first time we're apartment housetraining a dog, I'm a little concerned that he's not going to "get" that he needs to signal to go out (the caveat being that I may totally be over-analyzing this). Since he's always being picked up, I'm a little worried that he's just learning that we're always going to take him out. I'm not expecting him to be accident free at this point, I just want to make sure we're making the best decisions to help him achieve some reliability and inter-species communication in the housetraining department.

We wondered about walking him to the elevator and out to his grassy area, but he can't really make it that far without a pee.

We've also decided that we want to housetrain straight to the outdoors (vs. paper training or litter box training).

So: What should we do to help make this apartment potty training experience work best?

Meet Sir Pees-a-lot

hindmost — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 10:52:43 -0800

My puppy is losing his housetraining when we get visitors. My 10 week old golden retriever is more or less housetrained. He whimpers or sniffs at the door and makes it clear when he needs to go. Last weekend we had company and he had 3 accidents over the course of 2 hours. Then followed 3 days of alerting us as usual when he needed to go and last night we had company again. We take him out at the top of the hour to go before company arrives. People arrive 2 minutes later, he gets a little excited but is soon happily doing his thing and by 20 after, he's left a puddle with no noise or signal. The mess is cleaned up, we have dinner and he's happily chewing on his toy at the base of our feet, showing no signs of excitement. By 40 minutes after the hour, he's done it again. This time, we catch him and take him outside to finish, and within another half hour is over I see him walking a little funny and take him out for his 4th pee. His bladder control is good enough to last 6 hours through the night, and at the time of the accidents he's just doing his usual thing and not being fussed over.

It's definitely being caused by the visitors as he doesn't do this when it's just us with him. I'm sure that he's not giving us his usual signals and we're missing them, he's just standing around and peeing, sometimes even as he's walking. Part of the reason we have guests is to introduce him to as many new people as possible to socialize him, so putting him in his crate is not really a solution. It seems too early for this to be marking behavior. Is it just the excitement? It seems as if he's just not bothering to hold it at all, which means that even when we do take him out, in half an hour he's going again. How do we get him to remember his housetraining when we have visitors?

During the day he's either under direct supervision or in the crate, we use a pee word and give a reward when he's completely finished. All messes are on hardwood floors and immediately cleaned up with Nature's Miracle so there should be no lingering scent triggers. It's never in the same place twice.

How to re-housetrain an already housetrained dog...

gwenzel — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 20:53:28 -0800

Help me figure out what's wrong, and re-housetrain my pug... I've got a female pug that's just shy of two years old. She's been completely housetrained for a long time now (a year or so). In the past two weeks, she's started peeing and pooping on the carpet again. Nothing in her schedule has really changed, her diet is the same, and we're still spending the same amount of time with her. She used to reliably tell us when she needed to go outside, but now she's just been doing her thing without warning. It was really cold a few weeks ago, so I thought it might have been an aversion to the cold weather, but it's warmed up again (well above freezing for the past 5 days or so) and she's still going on the carpet every couple of days. What's causing this, and what's the best way to get it to stop?

Housetraining cat

Sonny Jim — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:30:34 -0800

My housetrained cat has just started crapping on the carpet on a regular basis. My housetrained cat has just started crapping on the carpet on a regular basis. We have moved to a new city, new apartment. She's usually very good, she goes outdoors, but has recently taken to defaecating on the carpet even though she has been let outside. I think she doesn't like the garden, perhaps because the dirt is too hard or there are other cats that scare her or that it is a new place and she is stressed. I also suspect she started going on the carpet when she was kept inside when we first moved in because once or twice her litter box was too soiled. I just don't want this to become a habit. Any cat psychology tips would be very useful.