Dog dilemmas (long)

In My Humble Opinion
1

Dear dog-loving Dopers:

We’re having some issues with jeevpup2, a.k.a. Willow. It’s kind of a tangled dilemma, and I’m hoping for some ideas from the enlightened dog owners of the SDMB.

We adopted Willow about three weeks ago. She bears a remarkable resemblance to jeevpup1, a.k.a. Tino, which is what caught our eye immediately. We introduced them, and they seemed to get along, and she seemed very sweet, so we decided to adopt her. She’s about 2, according to the vet.

She is very sweet and they do get along. However, we’re having a couple of issues that are kind of interrelated. Specifically:

  1. Housebreaking: She still is not quite clear on the housebreaking concept, and it’s hard for us to train her because, unlike our boy dog, she doesn’t eliminate every time we take her outside. So there’s fewer opportunities for reinforcement. Basically, she goes about three times a day, tops. Add to that the fact that she gives no warning about when she needs to go. She just drops and goes. Thus, it’s hard to catch her in the act, and she can empty her bladder in about 0.4 seconds, so it’s hard to stop her on the rare occasions when we do catch her in the act.

She has, however, been getting better, and we’ve been extending her more trust. She is presently crated in the mornings. Our dog walker comes and, if she goes outside, she and her brother get unconfined playtime downstairs until we come home. We have (knock wood) not found many accidents when we come home. This week, for example, we’ve been accident free in the afternoons.

We also recently began letting her sleep outside her crate at night, with her brother (who is crate phobic and sleeps uncrated). Last night, however, she snuck downstairs and went potty, thus showing that she hasn’t yet formed the idea that she should not go in the house, or that she should tell us when she needs to go. Because she apparently doesn’t need to go that often, we’re at a loss to figure out how we reinforce the rule that “outside good, inside bad.” I think she’s starting to get “outside good,” but “inside bad” is still not clear.

  1. Jumping the gate: When we leave the dogs alone together, they stay in our basement. We put up a baby gate (32" high) on the stairs to keep them downstairs. I should explain how our place is laid out - we don’t have a door separating the basement from the upper level. There’s just the stair and a fairly open railing. jeevpup1 respects the gate and can’t wriggle through the railing. He also can’t jump it.

We used to put the gate at the top of the stairs. However, we quickly found out that jeevpup2 is a lot thinner and more slippery than jeevpup1. Translation- she can wriggle through the railing.

So we put the gate lower on the stairs where she can’t get to the railing. Guess who can jump a 32" gate while standing on a stairwell? (Aside - I can’t WAIT to get this dog into agility classes.)

  1. Whining/ separation anxiety: She became attached to us pretty quickly, and whines and barks a lot when we leave. She does stop at some point, but it apparently lasts long enough that our neighbors two floors above us are bothered enough by it to complain.

So, we’re kind of on the horns of a dilemma here. On the one hand, she’s not 100% trustworthy, and if we leave her uncrated and she has accidents, that could further delay her full housebreaking. Plus, such accidents could apparently occur anywhere in the house, since we have no good way of confining her to a particular area. (We have a 4" gate on order, which I really hope she can’t jump over.) But if we crate her and leave her, she barks and whines to the point of annoying the neighbors.

Any thoughts/ suggestions? We’re really trying to build to a world where we can leave them both alone together uncrated with confidence.

2

If you’ve only had her a few weeks, I’d just give her more time. Even the best house trained dog takes some time learning the ropes in a new environment. We’ve recently moved, and our dog had a couple weeks of accidents before he figured out how to ask to go out in the new house.

Not sure what to say on the crating, though. I’ve attempted to crate more than once, and I’ve never had a dog who really likes it. Like you said, they whine and bark when crated. It also seems to do very little as far as housebreaking; my puppy will go in her crate in the middle of the night unless we take her out right before we put her to bed. She’s OK in the crate overnight, but she stays far away from it during the day.

Of course, as I type this, lil’ Edith has for the first time ever gone into her crate without me pushing her in. :rolleyes: I swear, she’s reading this over my shoulder, and intent on proving me wrong.

3

Just noticed that 4" gate should be 4’ gate.

And thanks, Athena. My wife, softhearted sentimentalist that she is, is thinking about giving the dogs run of house. Which we may end up doing, but I’d like to know there’s an effective way to keep her downstairs if needed.

4

I’m not an expert, I’ve only raised one puppy, but for me, crate training was the way to go. It only took a few weeks of intense crating for my puppy to get the hang of it. I was strict, but I never left him in the crate for more than 4 hours. That meant getting up at 3 AM to take him out, but I could handle it for a few weeks. Blocking the stairs and keeping him confined to the basement didn’t work, he would just go on the floor - not what I wanted him to learn. He went pee in his crate a few times, but I stuck with it. Soon he learned that if he could hold it, he would be let out and receive lots of praise when he went in the appropriate spot outdoors. I was pretty much sleepless the first few weeks, and I spent every free moment with the pup, but that’s what worked for us.

5

1.) Since the dogs are not dependant on only one person, you could try watering the dogs at set times; don’t leave her water in the afternoon, or after about seven at night. She won’t die in less than four hours without water.

2.) I have no help there; if she can jump the gate you need a door.

3.) You should leave the house separately, and alternate who leaves first. She won’t feel completely abandoned, or associate either one of you with leaving her all alone.
And leave her your dirty socks or the t-shirt you slept in.
And reprimand her when you hear her whine.
But once she’s house-broken and she can cuddle with the other dog, she may whine less.
And give the neighbors some flowers.

6

Hi…

Willow will need a little more time to adjust. I’d continue enforcing the crating technique to avoid accidents in the house, and recommend you praise the living daylights out of her when she does pee outside.

Also - limit her access to water after dinner and at night. This will prevent middle-of-the-night accidents, just like with a young pup. A few icecubes in a dish work pretty well.

As for confinment, I also have a gate jumper. Our solution was to get a very tall exercise pen (4ft) that she can’t jump over.

When it comes to separation anxiety, well, she’s new to all this (and to you all), so it’s normal she’s going to have some barking/crying issues at first. I would, however, encourage you to find yummy things to give her when you leave. A Kong toy stuffed with cheese or peanut butter will get you a long way. Hell, two of them in there will get you even further. I’d encourage the dogwalker to also do this when she leaves.

Associate a word with your leaving: “Willow, bedtime!”, give her the Kong(s), leave without making a fuss. Eventually, she will learn that “bedtime” means a) good food and b) a long nap but mom and dad always come back. When you release her from the crate, don’t even TALK to her. Open the crate door, and walk away to the door (to let her out). Praise her for peeing (if she does), and then let her in and THEN play.

She should learn in no time that crying/barking in the crate will get her nowhere, but that it’s not even worth her while because there’s far more entertaining things to do. Knuckle bones also work really well, if she tires of the Kong…

Hang in there, and work through the adjustment period slowly. Don’t give her priviledges too soon. Work with the crate, and make sure you have a good month’s worth of stable behavior before you make changes.

G’luck!

Elly and the service pooches

7

We do this, but it’s literally only three times a day, four tops. And she’s not reliable about going even when she has been confined for some time.

We do need to be better about this.

On order.

She gets a Kong already, but when we leave, she ignores the Kong and whines. I know that she’s not dying or anything and that the whining will probably eventually stop. The problem is in the short term - my neighbors are already getting annoyed by the barking and whining. While I don’t think they’re necessarily going to be litigious, it is a small building and we all do need to try and get along.

So maybe the question is, how do I train the neighbors? :smiley:

8

Maybe she needs a toy so engrossing that she doesn’t ignore it when you leave? Are you packing the Kong with tasty treats? For my dogs, a Kong filled with treats and plugged with peanut butter has never gone ignored.

They also really like those pressed rawhide bones and Nyla bones.

9

Well, of course it’s only three or four times a day. She’s an adult dog, and that’s about normal bathroom habits for a health young adult dog.

My advice would be to severely limit her water between dinner and bedtime, and pull it entirely when you go to bed. Trust me, they ain’t gonna die of dehydration in 8 hours. She’ll be thirsty when you get up, though. Give her all the water she wants in the morning, and leave a huge bowl in her crate. By the time the dog-walker comes, she should be more than ready to pee outside. This pretty much guarantees she’ll have at least one episode a day where you can reinforce the outside good message.

Lavishly praise her when there are no accidents, and ignore her when there are accidents to help her get the outside better than inside idea.

The asking to go out thing is a bit harder, though, because the poor thing may not realize that she can ask to go out. Even after a year, our shepherd still hasn’t caught on to the whole asking to come back in thing. If I forget she’s outside, she’ll sit out there in the rain and never once bark or paw at the door or anything. It might be worth your while to teach her some behavior that always leads to her going outside, like ringing a bell or something. Then, as she realizes that outside is better than inside she has something that she understands leads to her getting to go outside.

10

When you get your new gate, put that in place and then secure the old one above it in the doorframe. That will ensure that she can’t jump out of the place you are confining her to.

Since you have not been finding accidents in the basement when you get home, you probably don’t need this next bit of advice, but just in case: when in the housebreaking stage, we’ve found it most effective to confine the pooch to either the area where they usually sleep, or the area they usually eat - which in our house means either the kitchen or the bedroom. Dogs are naturally more reluctant to soil these areas, so it gives them more incentive to ‘hold it’ until you get home. At which time they can then be praised lavishly for going outside.

You can also use baby gates to keep the pooches in the bedroom with you so she doesn’t go elsewhere in the house while you are asleep. She won’t want to go in there, especially when you are all in there together. If it happens that she really needs to go, she’ll start pacing or acting anxious, which will wake you up, but also give you an opportunity to ask her if she wants to go out, take her out and then praise her for ‘asking.’ I like to get my dogs to understand that they can ask to go out - makes things more convenient for everyone! The female we got at Christmastime is just starting to figure this out - I think it is taking longer than if she was an only dog since our male already knows how to ask so she just goes out with him most of the time.

While I am not a big fan of restricting water intake, it is true that manipulating the availability of water at first can help since you can time it so she needs to go when you or your pet sitter are readily available to take her outside, thus providing an opportunity for praise.

As for the barking, if it really does become a problem you could try a citronella collar. I would imagine as she settles in that problem will stop though. Just kiss up to the neighbors a bit in the meantime. Buy 'em a bottle of wine or something and write them a note saying how you are sorry about the noise while your dog is in the training phase and how much you appreciate their patience during this time :).

11

One thing that has worked really well for me, is to wait until a time I’m sure the dog needs to go potty. Early in the morning, was a normal time, so I would go outside with the dog then. If it is a puppy, I may scoop him up and carry him to the door, but always made him walk himself outside, so he’d associate leaving the house with elimination. While standing next to the dog, I would issue a command “go potty” in my case, and then wait. If the dog wanted to play, I would ignore it, or say no and repeat the command. Even if the dog didn’t understand it at first, he knew something was expected of him. As soon as the dog began to relieve himself, I would praise the entire time, “good potty”, making it the biggest deal ever. Waiting around for a dog to pee can really suck, but I tell myself during that stage, it is so much better than having “accidents”.

I would also always go to a different spot for playing, and return to the same spot for “potty”. Eventually, my dog would actually try to relieve himself on command. This worked out great for car trips. He knew he would not be allowed into the truck, until he tried to potty. Of course, sometimes he didn’t have anything come out, heh, but he did make the effort and then was praised and allowed into the truck or back into the house.

12

I volunteer with a rescue group and one of the things we advise adopters is for them to try tether training.

Here are some other links that may prove helpful on house training and separation anxiety:

http://canines.com/library/solutions/outdoor.shtml

http://www.wonderpuppy.net/canwehelp/behaveD.htm

http://www.dogpatch.org/obed/obpage2.cfm

Good luck!

13

I’ve got a border terrier with severe separation anxiety, too. She’ll literally try to dig through a wall and if crated will drool until she’s standing in two inches of spit. Clomicalm can work wonders. Ask your vet about it. It is meant to be used short term while you desensitize the dog to that which makes her anxious.

14

Yep - sometimes an anti-anxiety drug will do the trick, at least temporarily, so that the dog has the time to figure out she isn’t GONNA DIIIIIIE :wink:

One thing that has worked really well with my anxious fellow is a homeopathic thing called * rescue remedy *. Works for some, doesn’t for others, but for my hyperactive aussie and my fretful toller, it’s worked wonders. Same for my parents’ dog Sophie, who is epileptic (calms her right down after she has a seizure!). It’s worth a shot before going to drugs…

As for training the neighbours, well that’s always a little harder :wink: Let them know she’s new, and that it may take a while before she settles, but that she will eventually. Ask them to keep a log of how long/when she barks to help you train her. It will give them a pro-active role in the matter, and they will know you’re aware of it and trying to fix it! :slight_smile:

If her Kong’s being ignored, then you hafta pack it with something even MORE entertaining. A chunk of cheddar. Or Kong now carries a line of cans called “Kong Stuffins”, like ez-cheez cans but only with liver flavored (or peanut butter flavored) goo. Pack some of that with some bread in there and voila, a tasty Kong. There are some websites with Kong recipes, too, if you wanna give that a shot… and one thing that NEVER FAILS is to… erm… dry some beef liver, chop it up in BIG chunks, and stuff those in there. I have yet to meet a dog who will be interested or distracted in anything else if there’s freshly baked LIVER to be had :slight_smile: I’ve also had success with chunks of baked chicken (that I had to really push hard to shove into the Kong, so they were hard to get out!).

Good luck! :slight_smile:

15

Good advice by Elenfair, as usual. Just thought I would add, you may want to be careful with the cheese, especially if you are still at the potty training stage. Some dogs are lactose intolerant, and could make for an unpleasant surprise when you come home to find that cheese eaten. :eek:

16

We trained our pup with the crate training method. It worked great. When we brought her home we started her out in a laundry basket. She slept in it even at night right by the bed. When she would start to whine I would put my hand in the basket and she would calm down. If she started rustling around I knew it was time to go outside. That would be 3 or 4 times a night.

She outgrew the basket quick and we bought a crate. Put it at the side of the bed, in the same spot, and did the same procedure. When you can’t watch your pup they need to be crated, until they are trustworthy. Lots of praise when they go outside and go potty. Treats and bribes aren’t a bad idea either. Eventually she was able to be trusted outside the crate and now she sleeps in the bed and has full house privliges. Give your pup lots of time and room for mistakes. As they say “Shit Happens” and when you have a pup its bound to happen.

17

Thanks for all the advice. An update on where we stand:

(1) The 4’ gate arrived. Unfortunately, due to some design choices made by the architect and builder of our home, the gate is cannot be fully supported along its full height on both sides. (The stair is an open design, and has a baseboard, so we can’t get contact along all the pads.) I put the gate up and set up a videocamera to record the proceedings while I went away for an hour. She cried pretty much constantly, and kept jumping on the gate. At about twenty minutes, she knocked a corner of it down just enough to wriggle through and run upstairs. She apparently stopped crying at that point, though I don’t know if the microphone would have picked it up if she had. She met me at the back door when I came home.

(2) I then tried leaving them alone with run of house, walking them first to make sure she was empty. Again, the camera recorded proceedings. I walked out, and she didn’t cry. She barked a few times at things going by on the street, but no crying.

(3) I decided to try leaving them alone today with run of house. I put her Kong and rawhide strip all the way back in her crate. She started to work on it, but as I turned to go, she came out, and started to try and get stuff from her brother’s Kong. It very nearly came to a fight. We did learn after we had committed to adopt her that she was food aggressive (something that was written in big letters on her file, but that the adoption counselor either missed or “forgot” to tell us). However, the dogs have been eating out of adjacent bowls for a while now, so I thought she was past it. Guess not.

I separated them and put her in her crate with her stuff. The brother stayed out with run of house. Again, the camera was running.

jeevwoman returned home from a business trip in the early afternoon and watched the tape. She said that there was crying for about twenty minutes in jags of 4-5 minutes separated by silence. The tape only runs an hour, so I suppose she could have picked up again once the tape stopped recording. But who knows?

I’m hoping she’s getting better, though the fight thing was really scary and leans me more towards crating her for at least the morning, when they get their food treats. Perhaps we’ll move the crate downstairs so that she can at least see the window (and so our living room is no longer uglified by the crate).

She is getting more regular about the bathroom thing too, but there’s still work to be done. She does not seem to be lactose intolerant, but does appear to be allergic to eggs.

Fun things you learn . . .

18

I know it sounds brutal, but why not let the other dog handle the fighting over food issue? Willow does not seem to have been pack socialized. She needs to be taught good manners, and I bet Tino can get the point across more clearly.

Unless you want to nip her on the snout when she misbehaves …

19

Because I don’t want to come home to bleeding dogs or worse.

20

I don’t have any novel advice for training the new girl, but I’d recommend giving her brother a little praise for continuing to be housetrained. Our Dal sort of “forgot” his training when we adopted a female Yorkie who wasn’t yet trained. I think it ended up taking longer to train her as a result, and we had to teach him that just because she piddled wherever she pleased, he still wasn’t supposed to.