More Dog Advice needed

In My Humble Opinion
1

We are continuing to have some serious issues in the housebreaking department, and need some more advice/ thoughts.

For those who haven’t read our prior history, here’s what’s happened. We already had jeevpup1, and recently (about two months ago) adopted jeevpup2. In most respects, she’s a sweetie, and the two of them really do get along quite well. However, housebreaking has been an issue for a number of reasons:

(1) She only goes a few times a day. Unlike jeevpup1, a boy dog, who will go every time we let her outside, she won’t always go when you let her outside. She usually manages to go at least once on a walk, and we always praise and usually give her a treat when she does. But we can’t set up a reliable cue for her to tell us that she needs to go outside because she doesn’t always need to go when she does.

(2) To minimize mistakes and train her to hold it, we began crating her when we’re not home. We started with crating her in the morning, but we ended up having to revise that plan because our neighbor complained that she barked and whined non-stop.

(3) We can’t realistically confine her to any area larger than a crate. She is capable of jumping over a 32" gate, and our attempts to use a taller gate have been frustrated because the architecture of our house does not permit us to anchor the gate firmly on all sides, the result being that she can knock it down.

We decided, with much reluctance, to give the dogs run of the house while we were gone. However, we’ve been consistently finding puddles of pee downstairs when we come home, including last week, when there was one every single day. We asked our dog walker to do a sweep of the house to look for accidents, and determined that the accidents all happened after the dog walker left. So, we decided to try a new plan - she would have run of the house in the morning, and would be crated in the afternoon until my wife got home.

Each of the last two days, she has pooped quite a bit in her crate, and today she tore her bed “to shreds.” We’re really starting to run out of options here. She clearly isn’t understanding the “don’t pee in the house” concept, and we aren’t home to reinforce it. The poop may be a separation or confinement anxiety thing, and I guess we’d much rather deal with pee than poop, but it’s frustrating and I don’t see what else we should be trying to deal with this. She’s physically capable of holding it a long time - she usually goes for the last time in the day around 6 PM and doesn’t go again till around 6:30 AM on her walk. So clearly she can hold it, but isn’t grasping the concept that she should, and we can’t be around to correct her.

Any thoughts?

2

No offense, but maybe you just have a dumb dog on your hands.

Once, with a previous dog, I was told to keep him locked in a small room (like a bathroom) because they won’t “go” where they sleep. I can’t remember whether he “went” or not but I do remember that he chewed up my medicine cabinet and ripped all the wood mouldings of the doorway.

How old is she? Maybe it’s the breed?

3

Hi, me again.

Well, my advice at this point is to ask your vet for a referral to a local behaviorist and ask for help.

I’m pretty sure they will tell you to go back to crate training, make sure she’s in a crate that is small enough that all she can do is stand, turn around, and lie down (no more) - yeah, she’s gonna bitch like mad at first, but eventually she will realise that nothing’s going to change and that the screamin’ ain’t helpin’. Make sure she has something really good to eat/work on in there.

If she shredded her bed and is pooping in her crate, she has too much space. Restrict it even more.

With her loose in the house, you’ll never get around your peeing in the house problem. You either have to have her confined OR be there all the time to pick up on cues.

We have a similar problem with one of our dogs - he’s a rescue, and he’s never figured out how to ask to go outside. He rarely has accidents now, but mainly that’s because he’s crated when we leave or when we can’t supervise him.

Write your neighbours a note - let them know what it is you’re doing for housebreaking purposes. Ask them to document how long she screams bloody murder. Make sure she can’t see your other dog, either. Put her in a room, put some soft music on.

If there are related anxiety issues, then talk to your vet. There are medications that can help, at least for the time being, in making her feel like the sky isn’t falling after all. :slight_smile:

Otherwise - yeah - consult a behaviorist and see what they say…

4

A wee anecdote…

When Valen was a puppy, he hated his crate. Bad enough that I had to chase him around the house to confine him when I left. Ooooh boy did he hate that thing with a passion. No matter what we put in there, he’d SCREAM (And tollers don’t bark or whine, they scream, it’s a breed characteristic, honest…) loudly for what seemed to be hours.

My neighbours were saints, I swear. I asked them to tell me how long he’d freak out. They were helpful.

At first, it was quite a while.

After about a week, he’d only do it for 15 minutes after I’d left, and then would chew on his Kong or a yummy fresh cow bone…

After a while, he’d go in willingly and couldn’t wait for me to leave…

Now? I can’t wean him off the crate. He’s almost 7, and has a nervous breakdown if it’s not available to him at all hours of the day. As I’m sitting here typing (the crate is next to the computer desk) he’s snoozing in his “box”.

…

The more I think about it, the more I’m wondering if your pup can actually see your other dog while it’s crated. Move the crate to your bedroom, put on some music, and close the door. Hell, if you have to, crate the other dog or pen it far away from your new dog so the new dog can’t hear him/her puttering around.

G’luck…

5

I had (still have, actually) the exact same problem with another rescue. Although I haven’t solved this completely, I’ve managed to get him to improve considerably.

My vet would not prescribe anti-depressants for separation anxiety until I met with her on-staff behaviorist. The behaviorist came over to discuss all my options. Everything she suggested, I had already tried and seemed to do no good. I can’t even crate my dog because he spent the first five years of his life in a puppy mill, crated. He becomes completely unglued as soon as I put him in. The behaviorist recommended Clomipromine, which is essentially prozac for dogs. (I called it dogzac.) Again, it did not completely solve the problem, but he managed to calm down enough to eventually respond to some training.

Now he will tell me when he wants to go out. He stands by the door and stares at me intently until I look up and see him giving me the evil eye. If I come home and leave again within an hour or so, he’ll get upset and go poop in the kitchen. If I’m gone and something upsetting happens (garbage man invades his yard), he gets upset and poops in the kitchen. He also gets up in the middle of the night because he just can’t make it between 11 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. – he has to go pee and poop in the kitchen.

I’m still working with him, shutting doors to keep him out of rooms, but he’s off the Dogzac. Call your vet and hang in there! I know this is the hard part, where you’d rather just cook him and eat him rather than clean up poo one more freaking time. Patience is key and I know how hard it is. Just remember, he probably can’t help it and is an innocent little pup.

Finally, I think 6 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. is far too long for a dog to have to wait. Your dog’s bladder is smaller than yours. Can you go twelve hours without peeing? I can’t. I take my dogs out four times a day and on weekends, they go out about every 2-3 hours, unless I’m not home. While they are physically capable of holding it for longer periods of time… why make them? If you made me wait 12 hours, I’d pee on your floor too.

Best of luck.

6

Growing up my mother raised a large number of dogs. When it came to housebreaking she had only one method, that never failed in the twenty years I was witness to it.

Newspapers are laid out directly in front of an exit doorway. When the dog is taken out to walk and/or pee this is the only door used. If/when the dog makes a mess in the house, simply rub the dogs nose in the mess (lightly, we’re not cruel bastards, just enough to cause discomfort, which doesn’t even require contact for most dogs) and sternly say “no,” then take the dog directly to the newspapers.

Within a couple weeks the dog will be making their messes on the paper. Whenever they mess, put them outside. Another two weeks, you take away the paper. Dog needs to go, goes to the door, can’t find the paper, whines, you take him out.

Personally, I disagree with letting a dog go for an entire workday without being taken outside for a stretch and a piss. If you can’t make some arrangement to get him out every 4 hours, don’t get one.

Then again, I’m a fascist.

7

Maybe my OP wasn’t clear. I don’t “make” her hold it from 6 PM until 6:30 AM. She holds it that long. I usually let the dogs out between 9:30 and 10 PM. The boy dog goes reliably every time. She almost never goes. I then let them out again between 5 and 5:30 AM, when I wake up. Again, the boy goes, but she almost never does.

I would love it if she did go every time I took her outside. But she doesn’t, and that’s what makes the process so frustrating.

As far as reducing the size of the crate, there isn’t all that much smaller it can go. It basically held just her, her bed, and a water bowl clipped to the front door. She had a Kong filled with cheese, chewy beef jerky-like treats and cut up chicken sausage to keep her occupied. It could probably come in about six inches and still hold her standing up.

She seemed to be fine with pooping and getting the poop all over everything. We had to throw out the bed, and she still smells like her own excrement. She also bent out several of the bars of the crate.

Again, we can try reducing the size of the crate, but if it’s an anxiety thing from being confined, she may not have full control of her bowels, and there is a limited reduction that is physically possible. My wife is sick and tired of cleaning up dog poop, having the house and the dog smell like dog poop, and was happier when Dog2 was just peeing because that was easier to clean up and the house and dog don’t smell like it.

It’s also not going to be possible to physically separate the dogs so they can’t see each other. Unless we confine one of them to the spare bedroom or put her far back in the basement, they’ll be able to see each other. It’s how our open floorplan works.

8

Someone else will come by soon enough to rip you about the advice to rub their noses in the mess. But just to clarify, we have a dog walker. We leave the dogs around 7:45, she comes around 1, and then one of us is back before 6. And the walker reports to us that the dog at issue does not have any accidents between the time we leave and the time she arrives. So we know that the accidents are happening sometime between 1:30 and, say, 5:40.

9

I guess I can do it…

Yeah, we don’t do that anymore. They don’t have the memory to understand what you’re doing. And all you’re really doing is making the puppy’s nose smell quite gross.

Unless you catch a dog in the act, or no more than 10 seconds after they’ve had an accident, they won’t understand why you’re chastising them and why you’re so angry.

10

Here’s a couple thoughts:

Has she been checked over by the vet? Because you can do all the training in the world, and if she’s got a urinary tract infection adding to the problems, it won’t do any good. I’m just asking because I can’t remember if you mentioned this in your previous thread about her.

Definitely do talk to a behaviorist, one that does clicker training if possible. It sounds like she needs to learn that you want her to go whenever you take her outside, and it is possible to teach her that. While that won’t directly deal with any anxiety on her part, it will help you in terms of how to communicate with her, and that may indirectly help her to feel more confident and content.

While you are working on the problem, get her some pet bloomers (or bitch pants, as breeders call them). You can stick a Poise pad or menstrual pad in them. Put 'em on her while you are gone. That way if she goes, you won’t have a mess to clean up, and eventually as you work with her she won’t need them anymore. You also may find she doesn’t care for it when she wets with them on, and will hold it just to avoid that. I have a male version of this item, called a belly band, and I use them when I’ve got a new dog in the house, and I can’t watch them directly to keep them from marking. It has worked very well for us.

Lastly, do try to remain calm! I know it is frustrating to have this problem - we have a dog with inflammatory bowel disease and when he has a flare-up we can come home to some interesting surprises too :eek: . Many dogs are so sensitive - if they can feel your stress, they can take it on themselves and that just escalates the situation. Relax, breathe! And be confident that together you can resolve this problem. And bless you for working on it too - so many folks would rather just dump a dog when a problem comes up than make the commitment to helping her.

11

So, I spent two hours cleaning up dog poop last night. And what did you all do for fun? :frowning:

As for the crate, I am pretty sure it is the right size for her. If she stands up in it, she reaches the top and if she turns around in a circle, she is pretty much at the 4 edges of it. So I am not sure we could make it smaller. Let me point out that she didn’t just poop nicely in a corner and be done with it. She pretty much had managed to shoot it out of the crate, all over it, her and the surrouding floor. I kind of admire her tenacity.

After the first hour of cleaning, I noticed that she had also managed to bend the bars of the crate on on side and had even broken some off. I guess she was trying to force her way out.

Needless to say, she won. She is loose in the house with jeevpup1. If I have to clean up urine every day for the rest of my life, so be it. I think that is the lesser of the two options.

She really is a great dog, this aside. Sweet, loving, very cuddly, well mannered, doing well in obedience class and adoring of her big brother. But really, I was ready to kill her last night.

12

We haven’t taken her to the vet yet, chiefly because she doesn’t seem to exhibit this problem on weekends. She’s on basically the same schedule on weekends as far as walks, mealtimes, etc. And we don’t have to deal with accidents. We even leave them alone for a few hours while we run errands, and haven’t come back to accidents.

So if it’s a UTI, it’s the funny kind that only affects her when we’re not around to see it.

13

Please re-read where I specify that touching the nose to the mess is usually not required.

A very good point, and one I should have stipulated in my original comment, but didn’t - shame on me.

I did not, however, make any reference to expressing anger towards the dog, nor would I ever condone it.

Dog’s are one of the more emotionally receptive animals I’ve been around. They know when you’re happy, sad, angry, etc.

14

It sounds like you have a couple of problems occuring together. I agree you should have her checked by the vet to be sure she doesn’t have an underlying medical condition like kidney disease. If she checks out fine in the health department, then you need to look at two issues.

First, it sounds as though she has a bit of crate anxiety. The shredding of the blanket is a classic sign. Clomicalm (clomipromine) can definitely help you with crate/separation anxiety. Talk to your vet about this. Generally, a dog takes it for a 2-3 month period while undergoing concurrent behavior training to reduce the anxiety.

Second, it sounds as though she truly does not have a clue why you are taking her outside. Sometimes a dog that has been punished for inappropriate soiling associates the owner’s presense + elimination with punishment, so she literally will not go in front of the owner. Dogs also view any porous surface as a legitimate toilet until taught otherwise.

One of my rescues was a sneak urinator–she would stand out in the yard for an hour and not pee, then come back in and find a sneaky place to do it. She was a classic illustration of a dog who associated being seen urinating with punishment. You have to view things from the dog’s perspective–she doesn’t see inside/outside as a huge difference in terms of what looks good to pee on. She also doesn’t see it as a “right” vs. “wrong” choice, but rather a “safe” vs. “unsafe.” If she’s previously been taught that it is unsafe to go in front of a human, she will continue to refuse to do so and will go when she feels “safe”…i.e. when no one is watching.

To re-train my sneaky pisser to urinate when I take her outside, I followed the advice of Jean Donaldson in her book Culture Clash:

Rule 1: Each and Every performance by the dog in which she appropriately eliminates must be caught and given immediate feedback.

Rule 2: the owner needs and wants to be the good guy most of the time.

To give feedback every time and to be the good guy, you must be present every single time the dog eliminates for the training period. This may require to you arrange your schedule to accomodate training for a week. You need to click and treat every appropriate performance so your dog gets a clue about what it is you want and what it is that earns your praise and reward.

You also have to eliminate the possibility of her making a mistake in the house. You have to catch her mistakes so you can interrupt them, take her outside, and reward her appropriate behavior. The best way to eliminate mistakes is obviously through use of her crate. But first you have to get her to like the crate. I suggest tethering the dog to you with a leash at all times she is not crated so that she has virtually no unsupervised time until you get this house training completed.

The basic procedure is

  1. Establish a reward history–take the dog to the same spot every single time and praise, praise, praise for every correct elimination. Another tip is not to end the walk as soon as the dog eliminates or she might think peeing means an end to her fun. Perhaps you can walk her after she pees.

  2. After elimination, the dog gets a bit of freedom–as in not tethered to you, but playing freely for a short period of time (while still supervised initially).

  3. Confine the dog except during supervised play time after elimination.

  4. Once the reward history has been well-established, set the dog up to make a mistake indoors. According to Jean Donaldson, an adequate reward history is demonstrated by the dog almost always beginning to eliminate immediately when taken to the reward spot. If you catch her in the process, you interrupt her with a “No!” pick her up or lead her to the normal reward spot, let her finish, then reward. She makes the point that this only works if you reprimand the actual act. If you instead reprimand her after she’s finished and is slinking away or sighing, you are reprimanding slinking and sighing, not inappropriate elimination. The dog just doesn’t think in that complex a manner and doesn’t make the connection you do when you reprimand after the fact. It is extremely important to have already established Going pee+owner watching+appropriate place=praise/treat. If you set her up to fail first, she just maintains the Owner+pee=punishment.

I either tethered Terri to me or used a baby gate to keep her confined to the room I was in at the time at all times. It’s hard to make a mistake that goes unnoticed if the owner is there all the time. It sounds like it is going to be necessary for someone in your house to arrange to be home with her most of the day for about a week. I realize this sounds extreme, but if you can’t arrange to spend a week training her, she may never get it, and that would be tragic, particularly if she loses her home over this.

15

This can happen - and has happened to us twice. Dog won’t mess in the house when you are there because they know you disapprove, but when they are alone and no one is there to show disapproval, they relieve their discomfort. Whether they go when alone or not depends on the level of discomfort. Sometimes it will be great enough that they feel they must go, other times it doesn’t bother them that much. I can speak from personal experience that the level of discomfort from a UTI can vary greatly even within a half hour :).

I’ve had two dogs with UTIs that were fine sleeping in their crates all night too, yet had trouble ‘holding it’ during the day. So you really never know unless you check, and you don’t want to do a lot of behavioral stuff first without checking, because that could just be an exercise in futility if indeed there is a medical problem adding to the situation.

16

Calliope–A very good method indeed, and we have been doing a lot of these, and should be working on the others, but here are some questions:

HOW do we catch her in the act? I guess we are just not used to girl dogs because to us, it looks like she is just on her way to sitting down. She is a very quick pee-er–even if we catch her in the act, she is done before the word ‘no’ is out of our mouths. Are there good warning signs for a girl dog? With jeevpup1, he cries, bites or at least lifts his leg. We really, really can’t tell with her. Any suggestions? Until we get the crate issues settled, we can’t confine her (due to the previously-reported problem of gate-jumping). Generally when we are home she stays with us and comes when called, so we can watch her for that, and her accidents when we are home have seriously reduced.

We do treat her for going outside and do not take her in right afterwards. We tried to have her go in the same spot outside but she just won’t go. It’s incredibly frustrating–we let her out, give her a few minutes, and she doesn’t go. We then bring her back in and start over. And she still doesn’t go. She is getting the hang of it a bit, now, and we’ve even seen her go in the front yeard (her pee spot) a few times, but not regularly. How do you make a dog go?

Her peeing in the house is mainly we are gone and only downstairs near the laundry room. She must think that this is outside, or close to outside, or something. Maybe we should just put newspapers down there and at least have her go on them?

I did like the suggestion of someone’s about dog diapers. This may be our best temporary solution.

Thanks to everyone for the advice, by the way. I know we have an excessive amout of dog questions, but it is just because we love them and want to make sure they are raised right. Scary what we’ll be like when we have human kids! :slight_smile:

17

Buddy is a sweetie, too, but he ain’t the brightest beagle in the pack. I’ve had several dogs but he was by far the worst to housetrain.

A couple suggestions:

Usually dogs have to eliminate after they’ve eaten. When you get up at 5 or 5:30am, do you feed the dogs? If not, I’d try to get her to eat and drink something about a half hour before taking her on a walk.

As others have suggested, praise, praise, praise her when she does finally pee and/or poop. I know you say she avoids going when you take them both on walks in the morning, but if you can carve out the time, I’d KEEP walking or monitoring her outside until she does the trick, even if I had to get up a half hour earlier to do it. She’s got to get the msg that peeing outside = praise.

Does she have 24/7 access to water? If so, I’d try eliminating the free access (provided, of course, that it’s not 90 degrees in the house) in the afternoon since you’ve pinpointed that the accidents happen in the late afternoon. That also means restricting access for your other dog, but thems the breaks.

It’s always helpful to combine positive reinforcement with negative reinforcement. That means that on the weekends you have to be diligent about trying to catch her in the act so you can yell a very firm “NO!” If she has a favorite spot, maybe you can cover it with plastic so that you can hear if she’s going.

Good luck!

18

Thanks, Pundit. We do give her about 30 minutes between food and walk and she is starting to get in the habit of going while on her walks. But she rarely goes in the yard when we simply let her out for a quick potty right before bed and first thing in the morning. Tino goes immediately (and on his ‘play ball’ command) but Willow is just reluctant. Honestly, if she were dumb, we could handle it, but she is so smart in her obedience classes and with getting over the gates that it seems like potty training is the anomoly.

She has a vet appointment for Monday, so hopefully that will tell us something. (Not that I want her to be sick, but it would be something we could take care of easily.) I told the vet what was going on, though I left off the part about the poop in the cage since that is clearly a cratee issue. (And if she would learn not to pee in the house, we wouldn’t need the crate, so the issue would solve itself.) They didn’t seem to think it was a UTI, but then when they pulled the file apparently the vet had written “wait on the UA and follow up in a few weeks.” Guess 2 months wasn’t quite a few weeks yet.

You know, it was quite hot here last week and she probably did drink too much water after her walk (though we told the walker to go easy). So we can control that better now that the temperatures have returned to the 60s. I will be home in a couple of hours so we’ll see what awaits me. As long as it isn’t poop, I will consifer it a victory. (I swear, I still smell it.)

19

Ah, I thought you were walking her. I have a fenced in yard, too, but it actually helps if you take them on walks at first because they usually do go potty when they’re on walks and you can then catch them in the act of doing something good. They need to associate peeing outside = good and they love praise so much that in just a short time she should understand what you want in order to merit praise.

This trick actually worked with Buddy. I’d walk him on a leash, just around the house, first thing in the morning. When he got around to peeing or pooping, I’d praise him, not so very enthusiastically or he’d stop mid-squirt, with a calm but happy, “Good, go potty.” Afterward, I’d give him very enthusiastic praise and a treat.

After a week or so of doing the leash thing, I’d simply let him out into the yard without a leash and repeat the magic words, “Go potty.” When he did his business, he was once again praised profusely and given a treat.

He will now pee on demand wherever he is when you say the magic words. What can I say? He loves BilJack treats.

If you come home to a mess, do not rub her nose in it. Do not look at her. Ignore her completely while you clean up the mess. Feel free to express your displeasure with a low growl or mutterings but don’t look at her. Dogs hate to be ignored and will understand that they displeased you and will want desperately to make amends. Let her outside with the words, “Go potty.” and praise her enthusiastically if she does.

Good luck! I’m sure she’ll come around.

20

After your reaction to my last resp to a dog thread of yours, I hesitated about responding, but none of the resps up-thread seem to be offering quite as much info as I would want, in your shoes.

First of all, training older pups and adult dogs is an entirely different matter than training young pups. The most apt comparison I can make is humans learning languages (primary learning period for humans learning languages is two to seven (or occasionally nine) years. It is a rare human who can really learn a new language well at a later age. The age range for dogs learning “where is the bathroom” is three weeks to about ten to thirteen weeks (max). Training at later ages is difficult and, sometimes, impossible.

I applaud your patience and determination. Now here comes the part that you may not like.

First, natural history: Canids (dogs, wolves, etc.) are natural cave-dwellers. If you’ve ever watched programs on Discover or someplace about African wild dogs, wolves, etc., you will note that if no appropriately sized underground cavity is available, they will excavate one. Those (correct term) dens, when excavated for the purpose, are never larger than absolutely necessary. Inside it is dark, normally quiet, and cooler (in summer) or warmer (in winter) than outside. Until the pups are big enough to trek outside (and can see), Mom cleans up their messes; no bathroom odors are permitted to linger in the den, as they would signal to a potential predator (e.g., cougar, for wolves in the N.Amer. west) that there were yummy tidbits inside. Pups who violate the Rule, after they are big enough - and have begun Training - get nipped by the nearest adult as soon as they start to “go”. Of course, dogs have those wonderful noses that can tell them instantaneously what’s happening. Oh, yes; and the pups learn as they get older to wait longer and longer periods - sometimes well in excess of 12 hours. So it is within their natural physiological limits (barring disease or congenital problems) to “hold it” that long.

Crating is the nearest we humans can come to providing dogs with their own personal dens. A crate which is only a personal refuge while Mom and Dad are gone for only a few hours does not need:

  • a way to see out (just don’t impede airflow!)
  • food
  • water

The only exception I can think of is for a very young pup who is crated for longer than four hours at a time.

One of the problems that pup2 is having that you haven’t recognized the significance of the issue that she is/was the only one being crated. I.e., you’re discriminating against her. Furthermore, she can see/hear/etc., her “brother” enjoying the freedom of the house. I think any experienced dog person you consult (vet, psych, trainer) will tell you, if you admit to crating one and not the other, that dogs which are contemporaries must be treated equally, unless one of them is clearly alpha dog and the other is clearly zeta or omega (not beta, but waaaay down the road) dog.

I strongly agree about the use of anti-anxiety drugs, but they should be used under consultation with a behaviorist (preferably one who has dogS (several) of his/her own), and for limited times, and preferably in diminishing doses.

I just realized I hadn’t commented on the poop in the crate issue. Isn’t she an adoptee from a pound/SPCA/whatever? If so, she has spent time in a crate, lots and lots and lots of time, and probably some in a “run”, with or without cellmates. For her, the crate is automatically anxiety-inducing: “Are they getting ready to get rid of me?” When there are many animals to tend and too few humans to do it, the animals often don’t get a chance to “exercise” - not only the elimination, but also the chance to stretch their muscles. It wasn’t that the people didn’t care; they simply didn’t have time to indulge the individual needs of however many dozens of animals for whose care they were responsible. So for pup2, the crate is a place of imprisonment or punishment. It is very hard (nearly impossible) to change this psychological reaction inside the dog’s head. Note I did not say impossible, but I think you will need lots of help, given that there are daily periods when there’s nobody home. Given how dedicated you seem to your dogs, is it possible that one of you could switch your work hours, or telecommute, or something? Not forever; just for six months or so.

BTW, I was a breeder/exhibitor of purebred dogs for 20 years (and “pet quality” pups were sold on strict spay/neuter contracts - no papers or permanent custody until the surgery was done). I’ve seen just about every problem a person can have with a dog (or dogs). I don’t know all the answers, but I do know quite a few.

I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a million bucks, but I wish you and your dogs every success and happiness.