Dog training question

In My Humble Opinion
1

My husband and I have a lovely cross breed white fluffy dog who has a bit of a problem. She has always gone through separation anxiety and for the most part she just redecorates. She throws the pillows around, jumps all over, well, everything and likes to rip up newspapers. Nothing really gets destroyed but she also pees and poos on the carpet. We ended up crate training her and all was fine. At the time we lived close enough to work that at lunch either my husband or I could go home at lunch and let her out for a bit. We have since moved and now have a nice backyard for the dog to play in but we can’t come home to let her out mid day.

We have lived in the new house for about two years and our solution has been to put her in the spare room. We made it so she could look out the window, always put toys in the room with her, and a bowl of water. It took months before she would stop flinging the water bowl around and she would consistently pee on the carpet. We tried to clean the carpet every time, but the smell just permeated. Now we are expecting a baby in July and the spare room is no longer spare. We ripped out the carpet and put in new flooring in prep for the baby. Since then the dog has had full rein over the house and she has stopped with the redecorating but will still occasionally pee on the carpet. This time she has moved onto the living room.

I can’t have a house full of dog pee but we don’t want to put her in a crate for a full day plus travel time. It’s not that she can’t hold it. I bring her to work occasionally and she can hold it that long no problem when there are people around. She would never go to the bathroom in the house when people are home and I don’t know how to train her not to do something she knows she can’t do, and that she only does when we are not home.

Any suggestions?

2

Keep her in the crate. Peeing every day in the house is unacceptable.

3

Our dog was a rescue and has (well, still has) severe separation anxiety, to the point where for two solid years he had to be medicated to keep his anxiety lower. We have a dog-walking service come in to take him out around lunch time.

Over time, he has gotten much better. He is no longer howling all day or shredding stuff. But we did have to get the help of a professional dog trainer to adjust us and our habits.

The biggest one: No rewarding anxious behavior. When we come home, we are not to immediately let him out of his “den,” he has to calm down first. We are NOT to console him, hug him, or reassure him. We were told specifically, when we let him out and he is a desperate freak, we are to ignore him, so he understands that us coming home is really no big deal, there was never any worry. Being apart from each other is normal and nothing to get excited or upset about. Once he is calm and behaving normally, then we can be affectionate.

We also had to put more effort into a regular routine, so it was: retire to den in the morning, dog walker comes at noon, a human comes home for the evening outing in the early evening, the entire pack is together overnight.

At the start, we also had to give him “puzzles” to solve that would keep him busy when it was time for us to leave for the day. Like a long bone with peanut butter jammed way down in the center, so he would have to work at it for a couple hours to get all the peanut butter out. Or a “hunting game” where we got a kind of ball that lets you put treats inside it and the dog has to turn it the right way to get the treats out. You get him excited about the toy and then hide it in his den so it will take him time to find it, free it from its hiding place, and then he has to work to get the treats out.

Over time, this combination worked out really well. It still took about two years, but now he doens’t howl all day, doesn’t shred stuff, and we can actually go out to dinner after work and not have a panicked freak on our hands because we were three hours late.

4

Put in a dog door and let her go into your fenced backyard at will. If your yard isn’t fenced, crate her at first, then put her in a small, uncarpeted room like a bathroom or utility room. The smaller the space the better until you can gradually let her into a larger room.

You might also see if you can hire a neighbor kid to take her out and play with her when they get home from school. That’ll give her a break.

StG

5

The problem isn’t that the dog can’t hold it, it’s that the dog is in distress and is fouling the rug to say “Hey, look at me! I’m upset! See how upset I am??? The pack is leaving me!” Even with free, unfettered access to a perfectly acceptable toilet, the dog will foul the rug to communicate “Help me!”

You have to address the reason why the dog is upset, not just try to deal with the aftermath. Anxious dogs can take a lot of work.

6

We tried that but she is not a food motivated dog. She wont give a treat filled kong toy a second glance and if food is not given to her she wont take it.

7

That is the hard one. I try to put her outside as soon as I get home and only great her when she is sitting, but my husband likes to calm her down before doing anything else.

8

Yup, it’s tough but it was the number one rule we got from the dog behavior specialist! (The trainer/behavior specialist wasn’t cheap either.)

You are the alpha pack members. Your dog looks to you to take all its cues on how to behave. If the dog is upset and you’re all “Poor baby, it’s okay! It’s okay! It’s okay!” you are giving the cues that the situation is upsetting you too. If the alpha is upset, the world must be ending!

Your dog doesn’t necessarily see your reassurance as “reassurance”, she just sees that you are going to her and petting her, making soft and squishy sounds (most people practically use baby-talk with their pets) which probably comes across as being submissive. You are top dog, but you are displaying wussiness. So your dog is thinking “Oh, shit! Here I’m totally freaked, but they are coming to me like I have to be the top dog! Shit, what am I gonna do???”

If you are calm, confident, and quiet the dog follows your emotional lead. You aren’t upset or feeling threatened. The dog sees how calm the rest of the pack is and settles down. “The pack is not agitated, so all must be OK.”

If I was in your place, I would not let her out until she has calmed down. Don’t engage her while she is being a freak. Don’t tell her “Sit!” (because she may think you are being aggressive because you’re nervous.) Just be calm, silent, and make sure you are using confident body language (keep your head up, shoulders back, not looking downward toward the dog). When she calms down, you can start talking to her, in a normal tone, and let her outside.

Our dog still flips out sometimes when we are late. He is not let out of his “den” until he is calm and totally quiet. Sometimes I can brew a cup of coffee while he is flipping out. But after ten minutes of hearing me rummage around the kitchen making very ordinary and unremarkable noises, he settles down. Nothing urgent or exciting is happening, the alpha is being boring.

When I open the door to his room, he walks out calmly with a toy in his mouth.

9

Also it helps to be able to read dog body language. There were somethings we didn’t know about that the trainer/behavior specialist pointed out. Repeated yawning can be a sign of anxiety. We did not know this. When we were getting ready to go on a trip and the dog saw us packing an breaking our usual routine, he started yawning, so we had to disengage from the dog a bit and go into “strong and confident” mode.

Also the timber of a dog’s bark is a huge clue. One happy “Ruff!” when we get home means “Yay! The pack is home!” but high-pitched, staccato barks means he’s a ball of anxiety and needs a timeout before we let him out.