How does your dog do what dogs doo so well?

In My Humble Opinion
1

As usual, I had plenty of time this evening to contemplate the differing evacuation procedures that my two dogs put me through.

Eight months old Sebastian is the easy one. While he still hasn’t quite grasped how to ask to go out (necessitating regular, scheduled trips out), he almost always pees on the nearest patch of grass after exiting the house. He’ll poop within the next two minutes, walk a few steps, then poop again. Repeat as often as you’d like at at least one hour but no more than six hour intervals, and he’ll keep going the same exact way. His only demand is that he always gets to go out too if Duncan is going out.

Duncan. Oh my stars and garters, Duncan. The suffering he puts me through. :frowning:

He’s the elder (at a year and a half), and despite our constant attempts to teach him to go on demand, remains a thorn in our sides. Any potty act, pee or poop, is a major production. He, at least, will bark when he needs to go out. However:

  1. He will only go in the side yard (pee only), backyard, at the side of the road when being walked for real, or in the middle of the road. (My dog walker started leaving me notes suggesting theme songs for him, such as “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”.)

If we’re staying on our property, his current path is down the stairs, up the left side of the driveway to the street, around my car (avoiding the grass on our now-left), crossing to the other side to walk down the right side of my husband’s car, crossing back over in front of the garage, and then down the side yard, stopping at three predefined points to peer through the bushes at the neighbor’s yard.

  1. If I am at home or in its immediate environs, he will ONLY go for me. He will quite literally dig in his heels if my husband tries to take him out, and if forced outside will refuse to do anything no matter how long my husband waits. He’s fine with whomever walks him if I’m away or at work.

  2. He will not go out between the hours of 11:00 pm and 5:30 am.

  3. He will avoid the grass if it is wet.

  4. He will refuse to go outside in anything heavier than a light drizzle, no matter how badly he needs to go. My dog walker also swears that he has the largest bladder of any dog she’s ever met - he will quite literally hold it for up to 18 hours or so rather then get wet. (Oddly, he loves the snow.)

  5. Don’t even mention fireworks or thunder. You’ll find him under the couch, and he will be staying there thank you very much.

  6. Once I have him actually outside and in the correct bit of it, it doesn’t matter if he’s been barking frantically to go out for the last hour. He’ll take between 10 and 45 minutes for him to actually go (if he even actually does). Part of the problem is that every little noise will distract him, but a lot of it is just me waiting while he sniffs around.

  7. I can count on maybe two hands the number of times that he’s ever gone both pee and poop on the same trip out. It’s not unusual for us to be back inside for less than 15 minutes before he’s asking to go out again to do the other one.

All I can say is, he’s lucky he’s cute.

2

Thought that I should mention - I put this in IMHO (not MPSIMS or GQ) in order to get stories about how hard or easy or quirky your pets are when they go. Feel free to chime in about your cats or birds or ferrets or whatever. :smiley:

3

Well, you’ve got my sympathy. I’m having my first puppy experience this year, and as a lifelong cat person, I’m amazed at all the time and work it is! I think we’re getting a handle on the pee/poop problems though.

I read somewhere that if you take a dog out and then run him back in the house as soon as he does his business, he’ll hold off on the business as long as he can because it means fun time’s over. Can you take Duncan for an extra walk? I’m also having good luck with giving praise and a treat when the job is done.

4

I don’t think I’d put it this way, DB, but to you, I am sure it seems the natural thing to do.

5

We’re getting a grip on it? We’re getting on top of the situation? :slight_smile:

6

I managed to teach my dog the command “sniff and pee,” which he does reasonably reliably when I tell him to.

He does have the bladder of a camel: once I fell asleep after my dinner, so I didn’t feed him or walk him, and at 6 am I had a dream of watching him pee all over the floor. I immediately remembered what had happened, jumped out of bed, reached for the leash and asked him if he wanted to go out. He lifted his head from the bed, raised an eyebrow as if to say “WTF? Don’t you know it’s 6 am??” and went back to sleep.

Re the other - He doesn’t give much warning at all. He has his favourite spots and if the … er … spirit isn’t moving him while we’re there, then he can do it the next time round. Plus he does that charming thing where he scratches at the ground when he’s done.

He likes to perch it atop something, proudly for all to see. Once we were on a really busy street corner in the middle of winter. He spied a small snowbank right beside a bus stop that appeared suitable for his purposes. At that moment a crowded bus pulled up, just as he assumed the position over the snowbank, which was right between the front and rear doors of the bus. (This all happened much too quickly for me to drag him off to a more private location.) People streamed off the bus, other people piled on to the bus, cars and pedestrians passed by … a great swirl of activity all around me as I stooped and scooped while trying to stop the dog from kicking snow and salt and dog shit all over everyone. Sheesh.

7

Oh, I’ve tried both. He’s just amazingly weird and picky. :slight_smile:

Last night, we went out at around 6:00 and he peed in roughly 20 minutes. We were back out at around 6:30, and he pooped in about half an hour. All was well.

He started frantically asking to go out immediately after dinner, so it would have been around 8:30. We went out, and he decided that he was only interested in going for a real walk. Oddly enough, I don’t like to walk mostly black dogs down the middle of a dark road without streetlights, so I refused. He gave up after about 10 minutes of standing motionless at the end of the driveway (as he dug in his heels if I tried to direct us to the yard three feet away), and asked to go back inside. We repeated this same process at about 9:00, 9:45, and 10:30, before it got late enough that he was uninterested in going out anymore.

Cue 5:55 this morning, when he woke me up to go out. He was happy to go into the backyard, but was less than pleased when I tried to keep us near the porch (as he pees faster in that corner and I wanted to go back to bed). So we went further down in the yard. Unfortunately, there was some sort of invisible animal in the neighbor’s yard, and he decided that he wanted over there more than he wanted to go. We came back inside at 6:35 without him going. Finally, he asked to go out again at 7:30. We went into the backyard, I hooked the dogs up to the cable while I dozed lightly on a nearby large rock, and Duncan finally peed at about 7:50.

Approximate amount of time between initial need to go and actual pee - 11.5 hours.

8

My dogs stay outside most of the time so they have a designated pee and poop area in the back yard. We’re building a run so it’s easier to clean up though.

When we go for walks, the oldest, Sichote, won’t poop if you’re looking at her. You have to pretend it’s not happening, then when she’s done and moved away, you can go pick it up. She also does the spinny thing before settling down to poop.

The young guy, Khuno, just poops and pees whenever the urge strikes, but he seems to do it in a tree well about 90% of the time. No idea why. Fertilizing the trees, I guess.

9

Mine both go without any drama at all. They drop trou pretty much as soon as they get outside.

10

Cite? :stuck_out_tongue:

Jasmine is an outdoor dog–we have a fenced in yard, and she’s loose in that yard any time we’re awake and at home. She has a 50 foot tie-out the rest of the time, because she’s a digger.

Anyhoo, I walk her every day unless it’s storming, both to avoid scooping poop in the back yard, and because she deserves the exercise and stimulation. The walk goes like this:

Really fast out the front door, pull, pull, pull, rush, rush, rush, until we get to the “green patch” which is the right-of-way of an un-built-upon piece of land (think pasture without cows.) Then, it’s sniff, pee, tear up grass, walk, sniff, pee, tear up grass, walk. At some point along that way, or around the corner by the pond (common property of our HOA), she’ll scoot to the very edge of the road and make poopies as close as possible to the *exact * point where grass meets pavement. :rolleyes: Then the rest of the walk is sniff, pee, walk, walk, walk, sniff, pee, walk, walk, walk…for a mile in total around the neighborhood, takes 20-25 minutes with the sniff-pee-tear-up-grass stops.

She doesn’t mind rain, as long as it’s not thundering. Thunder is a no-go. And since I don’t mind rain, as long as it’s not lightening, we walk in a mild drizzle plenty of times. :slight_smile:

11

We’re in a kind of dark area and my is black (and small) so I have a flashlight by the front door to grab for night walks. Ramps up the visibility quite a bit and makes it easier to find the little bugger (the dog) in the dark should she start walking minus the leash.

12

Round these parts, people use inexpensive LED bike lights attached to the dog’s collar.

13

My puppy (she’s 5, but she’s still my puppy) is funny. She assumes the position, and then looks around. If I’m looking at her, she’ll get up and walk a few steps till I look away. I can catch her out of the corner of my eye, but if I’m looking straight at her, she’ll pretend she was just stretching. Prissy little thing.

14

During the winter, I usually walk Jazz at night. So she has a reflective leash and collar, I carry a flashlight, and I also have a reflective harness for me (and wear a white sweatshirt or t-shirt.)

15

Not a big problem for us. We have a fenced yard, so Ki, our pet dog asks to go out when he needs to by tapping on the glass door. We have a patch of lawn back there which he uses. Nebula, our guide dog breeder, goes out first thing in the morning, before eating, and runs back and forth when she needs to.

For walks, we have an elementary school across the street from us, and a small park next to that. If we take them to the school field to run, they’ll go there. When we walk, Nebbie goes in the park within about five feet every time. Then we can walk for miles with no problems. She’s been trained to go on command. Ki, however, likes to keep his doggie blog on every bush he passes, and will ask to go a new route when he needs to check his p-mail.
It is a relief that Nebbie is back to 3 cups of food a day. When she was pregnant, and eating about 5 or 5 1/2, she produced prodigious amounts of poop.