My girlfriend, who lives with me, has two small dogs. Ricky is a 10-year-old shitzu/poodle mix, male. Zita is a 5-year-old longhair chihuahua, female. Zita is the main problem here: Every night, she poops and pees on the carpeting, mainly just outside the kitchen. I take her for walks just before bedtime, and put her food and water up so she can’t take a drink at 1 in the morning and pee at 5 or something, but it seems that no matter what she always pees on the carpeting. My girlfriend thinks that it’s the change of surroundings, but they’ve been here since January with no change in behavior.
Both dogs get treats for going outside and peeing/pooping after dark. Ricky has no problem going just outside the door and doing his business, but Zita will only pee where he’s peed and she refuses to poop unless we walk a few blocks, and Ricky can’t keep up. Ricky has fewer problems than Zita - Zita stayed with relatives for a month or so, and the carpet suffered much less while she was gone (though he left one shitstorm in the bed, once).
Is there anything I can do to train Zita to not pee on the carpet overnight? I’ve run the carpet cleaner too many times and it’s wearing the carpet. I should add we’re in an apartment, and the landlord specified she wanted the new carpet to be maintained as well as possible.
Classic conditioning my friend. You not only need positive reinforement, but negative reinforement. Rubbing the dogs face in the feces is a wives tale, and should not be condoned. But a light pat on the hind quarters, or a VERY loud noise may work wonders. Especially if you catch her in the act. If you don’t and you are worried about it over night. Try a kennel. Your GF might not like it, but that dog would be out of my house after the umteenth pooping. She needs to be re-trained, and conditionaing a dog to poop only outside can be done. And why reward the dog when you step out the door? You should be rewarding the dog when she poops only. and when she does it inside you whould have some sort of punnishment set up. That is the basic premise behind classic conditioning. reinforcing wanting behaviours and punnishing the behaviour you do not want.
SanibelMan, you may want to invest in some odor-neutralizing cleanser. No matter how many times you clean the carpet with soap/water/carpet cleaner, she’ll still find her mark and go there. You can also purchase a black light, turn out the lights and it will show you exactly where she’s peed or pooed. You can get neutralizers from places like PetSmart or Petco.
I’ll also be really honest–in my experience, and in the experience of many, many, many people I know…smaller dogs are just hard to housebreak. I have (well, technically he belongs to my wife) an Italian Greyhound, which we’ve had for about a year now, and he’s still not fully housebroken. He still has the ever-frustrating accident and periods of backsliding. If the neutralizer doesn’t help at all (and I think it would), you can consider crate-training her. You can find lots of info about that here.
I’d recommend crate training. You really have to confine the dog at night. And definitely get either “Nature’s Miracle” or “Simple Solution” to neutralize the odor. “Simple Solution” is a lot cheaper, but is harder to find.
I also vote for first cleaning the area with the neutralizers then introducing the little darling to her brand-new crate, and hope you don’t wind up with a situation like we had with our youngest, who had no problem whatsoever with going to the bathroom in said crate. ::grumble:: Barring that, and seeing as she sticks to the same spot, how about laying out some of those puppy training pads? That way instead of cleaning the carpet you can just trash the pad in the morning.
Crate training is the best best – as long as your dog doesn’t have anxiety problems. We have a golden retriever with severe separation and thunderstorm anxiety, and he FREAKS if he’s put into a crate. (Believe me, we tried it.) And he poops on the carpet occasionally just out of pure anxiety.
Anxiety issues aside (if anyone wants to hear how we’re coping with that, we’ve found some good solutions), the best carpet odor neutralizer I’ve found can actually be found at your grocery store – Arm & Hammer’s pet odor remover. The baking soda seems to get the odor out better than anything else. HOWEVER, the carpet MUST be COMPLETELY dry before putting the stuff on or it may stain. Just to be warned.
Small dogs are often more difficult to housebreak than large dogs. I’d definitely try crate-training her, with positive reinforcement when she goes outside. Make sure the crate isn’t too big - she shuld be able to stand up, turn around and sit in comfort. Any bigger and she’ll start using a corner as her place to go.
You might also try to help her communicate her needs to you. We were having a lot of trouble with housebreaking. But then we hung a bell from our front doorbell. Every time we took our basset–whom we adopted, untrained, at the age of nine months–outside for a walk to do business, we would jangle the bell. Eventually the dumb dog figured out that if he rang the bell with his nose, we’d let him out to go. You’d think he’d just whine or something, but no, he didn’t clue in until the bell.
We eventually took the bell down as he started pulling false alarms when he was bored and wanted to go outside. Now he sits by the door to tell us.
