Getting Your Dog Clean In The House

About ten days ago I had a phone call from a friend who was desperate for some advice on her new dog.

It's a young labrador bitch she rehomed from a rescue centre. They weren't sure exactly how old the bitch is, but reckoned she was approx 1 year.

My friend's been tearing her hair out because the new dog, although she never pees in the house, consistently takes a dump inside at night.

Every morning my friend comes downstairs to a big pile of smelly you-know-what.

She always lets the dog out in the garden last thing at night, then first thing in the morning there it is waiting for her on the floor - a most unwelcome package.

We've all been there, haven't we? It's not very pleasant, but when you get a new puppy it's just part and parcel of the housetraining process.

But for a 1 year old? That's a different story altogether. There's absolutely no way that a one year old dog is incapable of lasting the 6 or 7 hours that my friend is asleep for. That dog is perfectly capable of lasting the night, but for some reason it's not doing it.

I don't want to dwell too much on why it might be happening - there are a number of possible reasons.

What I want to discuss instead is how you prevent something like this recurring. This is what I suggested to my friend....

Dogs hate defacating or urinating on their bed. They will never choose to do it deliberately. If they're going to do it in the house they'll always move away from their bed first.

But if they are unable to move away from their bed they're in a bit of a dilemma. So what you want to do is make sure they can't move away from their bed.

The easiest way to do this in practice is to have them either in a crate/cage or else use something to barricade them in.

But it's important they have sufficient space. They need to be able to stand up, stretch and turn around, and there also needs to be space for a water bowl. But no more room than that, otherwise they'll be able to move away from the bed.

My understanding is that crates are commonly used in the US, whereas here in the UK comparatively few people use them. What I recommend to people here is to visit the hardware store where you can pick up sheets of plastic coated wire mesh. They come in various different sizes.

You need five sheets - 2 sides, a roof, back and front. Depending on the size sheets and the size of your dog you may be able to get away with 4 sheets by cutting one in half to use as the front and back.

You then need to get some soft wire and wire it all together. If you tie it at about 3 inch intervals that will be adequate. It's a bit of a fiddly job to wire it all up but once you're done it'll work every bit as well as a ready made crate, but you will have saved yourself a small fortune in the process!

(Just make sure the section that's going to be the door is only permanently wired along one of the uprights. That will act as a hinge, allowing you to open and close it. Once the dog's inside you'll have to wire it shut, or else find some other way of keeping it secure.)

The idea is to make sure the dog empties itself out last thing at night. So if you're in the habit of just turning it out into the garden you need to actually go out with it to make sure it's actually doing something.

As soon as the dog does a dump you praise it gently then bring it back in and put it straight into the cage (which contains the dogs bed, a bowl of water and nothing else). You may have to put some sort of weight on top of the cage depending on how smart your dog is.

Ripple, who I lost earlier this year, was extremely smart. I had her in a cage like this at night for the first 2 or 3 weeks as a young puppy. She very quickly worked out that she could shove her nose through the mesh at the base, give a quick flick and lift the whole thing off the ground, at which point she'd dart out! But once I put a few heavy weights on top that soon put a stop to that.

If you have a *really* strong and persistent dog this might not work for you, in which case you need an extra sheet of mesh to use as a floor.

If it's in the habit of having a dump in the night it'll almost certainly do it as usual the first night in the cage. But because it can't move away from the bed it will have been done right beside, or possibly even on, the bed.

This will, I'm afraid, probably be pretty revolting for you, as in addition to the usual mess you've also got to clean up the bed. And if you ended up having to use an extra sheet of mesh for the floor, you'll have to clean that up too. (Yuk!)

However, the good news is that if you found it revolting, you can bet your life that the dog did too. Not having been able to move away from its bed will have been a very unpleasant experience for it.

It's not unusual to solve this problem in just one night - by the second night the dog doesn't want a repeat performance and lasts the night.

However, it may well take 2 or 3 nights of this before the penny drops, and if you're really unlucky it could take as long as 7-10 days. But I don't ever remember it having taken longer than 10 days.

The important thing is to make sure you're consistent about this, so every night you follow the same routine - out with the dog last thing, praise it when it performs then straight into the cage which is only just big enough for the dog to stand up and stretch.

If, when you come down in the morning, you find it's made a mess in the night don't make a big deal of it, just let the dog out and praise it when it performs outside. Then get everything cleaned up.

If you can make the dog understand that you're pleased with it when it performs outside, you'll soon get there. It'll find defacating on its bed very unpleasant, and coupled with your praise for doing it outside the penny will soon drop.

Once you do seem to have made it I suggest you take it in stages from that point on. First step would be to stop accompanying the dog outside last thing at night (assuming of course that you have your own garden and were previously just turning it out. Obviously if you live in an apartment without a garden you're going to have to accompany the dog on the late night walk.)

Once the dog comes in, it's back into the cage as usual. Assuming there are no problems at this point the next stage is gradually to give the dog more space at night. This can be tricky but you somehow have to rig up a barricade that allows it more space than it had in the cage, but that still doesn't give it free run of the whole room.

If you have any reversion to defacating indoors at any point in the process, you just have to go back a stage and try again.

But before you know it you should be able to dispense with any form of cage or barricade and you'll come downstairs to a clean floor.

It's like so many things in dog training, in that it can be a real challenge at the time but it's worth going through the effort involved if you end up solving the problem. What would you rather - go through the hassle I've just described, maybe for as long as three or four weeks from start to finish but then end up with a perfectly clean dog. Or just muddle on with things as they are, never knowing what you're going to find when you come down in the morning?

Recommended reading "Dog Training Blueprint To Success".

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