Chapter 8

Fine-Tuning Housetraining

IN THIS CHAPTER

Determining your dog’s potty style

Teaching advanced bathroom behavior

Giving your dog more freedom

Plenty of signs can indicate that a dog has mastered Housetraining 101. Here are a few:

• You haven’t used your commercial pet stain cleaner for weeks, whereas a month or so ago you were using it almost every day. An unused bottle of cleaner probably means that your puppy pal isn’t having any indoor accidents.
• You’re consistently scooping up litter or cleaning up either soiled papers or a bathroom tray soon after each meal you serve your indoor-trained dog. This after-dinner (or after-breakfast) ritual means that your four-legged friend is eliminating on a regular schedule and probably isn’t having any out-of-potty accidents.
• You come home from work and find that the newspapers that you left for your dog in the morning are unsullied by canine poop or pee. Moreover, the papers have consistently gone unused over the past couple of weeks. Consistently clean papers signal that your canine companion is holding his poop and pee all day and is confining his bathroom maneuvers to outdoor turf.

If your dog shows these or similar signs of housetraining mastery, congratulations to both of you on a job well done! By successfully teaching your dog basic bathroom manners, the two of you have laid the foundation for a rich and rewarding friendship.

But why stop there? Maybe your dog can learn to ask to go out if he isn’t doing so already. And life certainly would be easier if your dog were to master the ultimate housetraining feat: doing his business as soon as you tell him to. Think what it’d be like to be able to take your dog out at night and not have to walk up and down your block until he decided to pee. Instead, you could march him to a particular potty spot, tell him something like “Fido, do your business!” and know that Fido would do just that. This chapter helps you teach him these advanced bathroom maneuvers and more.

Decoding Pre-Potty Maneuvers

Before you can boost your dog’s housetraining skills to the advanced level, you need to decode his individual potty style. In other words, you need to know exactly what he does just before he actually eliminates.

Why is this knowledge so important? Because the key to teaching your dog advanced bathroom manners is being able to anticipate when he needs to take a whiz or make a deposit. Fortunately, most dogs provide clear signs that the urge to poop or pee is taking hold. The trick for you is to observe the signs that your dog exhibits. Then you can put your observations to work as you teach him those fancy bathroom maneuvers.

Here are a few common examples of pre-bathroom behavior. In general, the more intensely and purposefully the dog is performing his pre-potty maneuver, the more likely he is to actually poop or pee.

• The Statue: Some dogs simply call a halt to any and all activity and stand as still as statues. Seconds later, they start to do their business. This no-frills approach to elimination is very common among young puppies, who frequently don’t realize that they need to go until they’re just about to do the deed.

• The Pacer: Many pooches engage in back-and-forth pacing before they eliminate. When such a dog is near her potty spot, she begins to walk in one direction and then turns around and walks an equal distance in the opposite direction. Depending on how badly she needs to go, she may walk back and forth once or twice — or as many as a dozen times.

  Many a Pacer starts her pre-potty routine by walking as far as 5 or 6 feet in each direction. As the urge to go strengthens, she gradually shortens the pacing distance until she’s trotting only a few inches back and forth. At that point, the dog eliminates. The speed at which a Pacer does her thing varies, although a speedy pace usually indicates that she’ll be unloading momentarily.

• The Circler: Quite a few dogs start walking around in circles just before they eliminate. The sizes of these pre-potty circles vary: Some have diameters that aren’t much bigger than the dogs themselves, and other circles may sport diameters of several feet. Speed varies, too, although just as with the Pacer, the faster the circling, the more imminent the potty event usually is. In fact, some Circlers literally run rings around their people just before pottying.

• The Sniffer: Almost every dog engages in some sort of pre-potty sniffing before he actually does the deed. Some dogs sniff before beginning to circle or pace; others confine their pre-potty maneuvers to intense snuffling of a particular spot just before peeing or pooping on it.

  As with circling and pacing, a dog’s sniffing speed varies greatly depending on how intense the urge to eliminate is. Generally, a dog who’s moving his nose along the ground in a leisurely manner is still searching for what he considers to be a proper place to potty. However, intense, concentrated sniffing of a specific spot often indicates that a dog is about to anoint that spot.

• The Beeliner: Some dogs, such as my Golden Retriever, Allie, take a linear approach to finding a potty spot. They sniff a little bit but then make a beeline for the place where they want to poop or pee. If this description fits your dog and you’re walking her on leash, be sure to hold tight to that leash after she starts sniffing.
• The False Alarmist: Some dogs are so particular about where they do their business that they engage repeatedly in one or more of the pre-potty maneuvers outlined in this list, only to stop before actually eliminating. Cory, my late, great Sheltie, was a master of this technique, and Allie is becoming a quick study. Still, you can decode such a dog’s pre-potty behavior by paying a little closer attention to what happens when your dog actually does go. For example, most female dogs not only squat but also stretch out their backs before they pee. When Allie squats but fails to execute that pee-pee stretch, I know that she’s changed her mind about anointing that particular spot.

Some dogs adopt more than one potty style throughout their lives and even within the same potty break. For example, Cory tended to be a Circler before he peed but was more of a Pacer before he pooped. Allie is a classic Sniffer but also is quite the Beeliner, especially when I bring her near a spot where she’s done her business before or where she realizes other dogs have done their business prior to her arrival.

In any case, after you identify your own canine companion’s potty style(s), you’re ready to teach him some advanced bathroom manners, starting with asking to go out.

Getting Your Dog to Ask to Go Out

A great skill is for a dog to somehow communicate to her people that she needs a potty break. Some dogs, like my Sheltie Cory, teach themselves to ask their people to take them out (see the nearby “Cory becomes teacher’s pet” sidebar). Others need a little help from their humans. If your dog falls into the latter category, this section’s for you.

Sometimes all you need to do is put the leash in the same place every time you hang it up. That was true for Cory. My family and I always hung his leash on the same doorknob every time we came back inside from a trip to the potty. By always putting the leash in the same place and by always using the leash when we needed to take Cory out, our Sheltie guy soon figured out that the fastest way to tell us what he needed was to go to his leash and tap it with his nose. You can do the same thing when you housetrain your dog.

Put the leash in the same place each and every time. Use the same words whenever you take your canine companion to his outdoor potty spot. Do exactly the same thing every time you take your four-legged friend out, and you create the conditions that help him figure out a way to tell you when he needs to go.

But if you don’t want to play a waiting game, don’t hesitate to take a more active approach to teaching your dog to ask for a potty break. Here’s what to do:

1. Get a signal maker.

   Find something that can hang from a doorknob within reach of your dog’s nose or paw and also makes a pleasant noise when the dog touches it lightly. A set of Christmas bells fits the bill.

2. Teach the signal.

   Every time you take your dog out for a potty break, ring the bells. Do this consistently so that your canine companion associates the ringing of the bells with your taking her outside.

3. Let her try.

   Sooner or later, your dog will want to check out the bells herself. Encourage her to do so: Praise her enthusiastically if she even sniffs the bells.

4. Heed her signal.

   The first time your dog taps the bells with her paw or nose (see Figure 8-1), respond promptly: Take her outside! Bring her to her potty spot and praise her lavishly if she goes. After a few times, your dog connects her ringing of the bells with your taking her outside.

FIGURE 8-1: Your dog doesn’t have to say a word to tell you when she needs to go out.

Don’t let your four-legged friend fool you. If your puppy rings the bells but fails to do her duty when she’s outside, march her back inside.

Many dogs figure out their own ways to tell their people that it’s potty time. For example, Allie employs one of two methods to tell me that the bathroom urge is upon her: coming over to me and staring at me or running into the family room and scratching on the door that leads outside. Just as you watch your dog to decode her potty style, study her behavior to see what she does to tell you that she needs a bathroom break. Her signals may be quite subtle, but if you pay close attention, you can probably see how she’s trying to convey what she needs to do and what you need to know.

CORY BECOMES TEACHER’S PET

For every dog who’s the subject of a housetraining horror story, another dog quickly decodes the do’s and don’ts of proper canine bathroom behavior. Fortunately for me, one of the latter dogs was my dearly departed Sheltie, Cory.

Of course, I want to believe that one of the factors behind Cory’s housetraining prowess was the possibility that I was doing something right. But whatever the reasons were, my outdoor-trained Sheltie guy had only a couple of indoor potty accidents during his entire housetraining process.

The funny thing was that it took me a long time to realize how well Cory was doing. I followed the outdoor training schedule outlined in Chapter 6 until Cory was well beyond his 3-month birthday. After that, I gradually cut back on the amount of time he spent in his crate and increased the amount of time he could run around the house. But I watched him like a hawk the whole time; he didn’t get any unsupervised time at all.

Then, one morning when Cory was about 6 months old, he surprised me. He and I were playing together, and although he wasn’t due for a bathroom break, he suddenly stopped what he was doing. Then he walked over to the doorknob where his leash was hanging and tapped the leash with his nose before turning to stare at me.

I’m no rocket scientist, but I suspected that Cory was asking me to take him out. So I snapped on his leash and walked him outside to the median strip in front of our house. As soon as we reached the strip, Cory opened his floodgates. I was thrilled. And I figured that if Cory could tell me when he needed a bathroom break, I didn’t have to worry about him having an accident in the house. In short, I was ready to consider him fully housetrained. And from that point on, Cory fully justified my faith in his bathroom abilities: He never relieved himself in our house for the rest of his life. He clearly had gotten the housetraining thing down pat.

Encouraging Elimination

Picture this: a dark and stormy night. You and your canine companion have spent a blissful couch-potato evening. Now it’s almost bedtime, but instead of moving directly from sofa to bed you have one final task to accomplish: taking your dog out for his last potty break of the day. And you’re dreading it.

During most weather, you don’t mind the end-of-the-day trip outside to your dog’s potty spot. On nights like this one, though, the p.m. pit stop is quite another matter. Like most dogs, your special friend dislikes doing his business in the rain. Add some wind and cold, and the dislike mushrooms into out-and-out hatred. At such times, you just know that when you let him out to do his business, he’ll stand next to the door, shiver, and attempt to look pitiful. Under no circumstances will he allow the damp ground to even brush against his hindquarters. And no way will he actually unload in the rain.

Having you with him doesn’t spur your pee- or poop-retentive pooch, either. What happens instead is that the two of you get to stand outside and get soaked together. That’s not my idea of quality time, and it’s probably not yours, either.

Some lucky owners are able to teach their dogs to do their business on cue. Others, me included, have dogs who set their own potty agendas, thank you very much. That said, you can still encourage such dogs to potty sooner rather than later. Here, I discuss how to teach your dog to unload when you ask him to and how to cope if your dog replies, in effect, “I’ll go when I decide to go.”

Peeing on cue

The theory behind the peeing-on-cue maneuver is simple: You help your dog associate a kind of potty prompt with the act of urinating. When your dog makes that connection, he’ll pee when you ask him to. Thus, when you and Fido are out in the rain, you simply march together to the potty spot, you cue Fido to pee, and voilà! He does.

In fact, your newly housetrained puppy may already pee when you ask him to if you’ve followed the instructions for outdoor training in Chapter 6. But even if your four-legged friend hasn’t mastered this maneuver, you can still teach even an adult dog with fully entrenched bathroom habits to do his business when you ask him to. Here’s how:

1. Pick a potty prompt.

   Make this decision carefully. The ideal bathroom command is a phrase that you can use without embarrassment. For example, you may feel more comfortable telling your dog, “Fido, do your business,” rather than “Fido, go take a leak.”

   Be careful that the prompt is a phrase that you’ll use only when telling Fido to pee. A more general-sounding prompt, such as “Hurry up,” can bring unwelcome results, such as Fido’s anointing the carpet at the same time you’re telling your children to get out the door so that they won’t be late for school.

2. Take your dog to his potty spot the next time he has to do his bathroom business.

3. Watch for pre-potty signals.

   If you’ve taken the time to acquaint yourself with his potty style, you know what to look for (see the earlier section “Decoding Pre-Potty Maneuvers”). When he starts those maneuvers, get ready to see him pee.

4. Give the prompt as soon as your dog starts to pee.
5. Praise him lavishly and give him a small treat when he’s finished.

Within a couple of weeks, he’ll likely have made the connection between the potty prompt and the act of urinating and respond accordingly.

Prompting Mr. (or Ms.) Independent

I have a confession to make: Although I’m familiar with the mechanics of teaching a dog to urinate on cue, my own canine companions just won’t do it.

Some of my friends tease me about my Golden Retriever Allie’s (or before her arrival, Cory the Sheltie’s) refusal to learn this maneuver. They want to know how I can possibly write a book about housetraining if I can’t even get my own dog to piddle when prompted. (In my defense, their lack of motivation probably isn’t my fault; see the nearby sidebar for details.)

To make matters worse, some dogs’ pre-potty behavior is, to put it mildly, erratic. Cory sometimes offered no warning at all that he was about to eliminate outdoors. He’d just be walking along when suddenly he’d stop and do the deed before I even realized what was going on. Other times, he’d pull so many false alarms that I gave up trying to anticipate when he’d actually go. Allie, my present canine companion, has also mastered the dubious art of the false alarm, going so far as to actually squat and then stand up and begin moving again without having unloaded anything. Consequently, I’ve had a hard time teaching each dog to potty on cue, because they offered conflicting information about when they were really going to go.

But even if your dog defies your efforts to teach him a potty prompt, you can still speed up his pee-pee process. Here’s how:

• Fake him out. So what if it’s raining? If you act as if walking in a downpour is more fun than playing fetch, your dog may believe you — and that belief may help him relax enough to go.
• Stay loose. A dog is more likely to do his business if he’s relaxed rather than tense. For that reason, be sure to stay relaxed, calm, and happy when you take your dog out for a potty break. If you feel yourself tensing up because your dog won’t go, take him back inside and try again in a few minutes when you’re both more relaxed.
• Praise him before the fact. If your dog shows the slightest hint that he’s going to go — for me, it’s when Allie moves from the sidewalk to the grass of the median strip — praise him lavishly. By doing so, you may help him realize that he’s got the right idea and encourage him to follow through.
• Find a familiar spot. Often, you can jump-start your dog’s urge to pee by taking him to the spot he anointed on his previous trip out. Chances are he’ll remember what he did there before and do it again.
• Find a communal potty. If you can’t remember where your dog went during your previous trip outside, take him someplace where you know other dogs have pottied. The scent of previously deposited canine calling cards may prompt your dog to leave a card of his own.

Both Cory and Allie tended to employ a kind of Murphy’s Law to their bad-weather bathroom maneuvers. At the times that I most wanted them to pee when I said to — such as late at night and/or during a downpour — my canine companions often decided to vie for the title of Mr. or Ms. Iron Bladder. Be it hail or snow, rain or sleet, when the weather was bad, Cory tended to shut his floodgates tight. If I got uptight or angry over this pee-pee retentive behavior, he made it clear that he thought any sort of walk was a bad idea. He’d actually try to pull me back into the house. Allie’s not quite as sensitive as my Sheltie guy was, but her distaste for whizzing in bad weather, much less dumping, becomes quite clear when the rain is pouring or the wind is howling.

HERE’S MY CARD: LEAVING A MESSAGE

In the “Encouraging Elimination” section, I lament my problems teaching my own dogs to go on cue. But experts note that I shouldn’t consider my inability to teach a potty prompt to be a failure on my part or a lack of intelligence on the parts of my dogs Cory and Allie. Such dogs just may not be interested in learning to pee on cue. The reason: For such dogs, the act of urinating means a whole lot more than emptying their bladders.

Certain dogs actually value their urine. Such dogs sprinkle pee carefully onto only what they consider to be the very best surfaces — surfaces they’ve selected on the basis of size, prominence, and preexisting odors. For these canines, their pee is their calling card — their announcement at a local street corner that they’ve been at that corner. These dogs are much less likely to evacuate their bladders at times and places they haven’t chosen than other, less exacting dogs are.

Such dogs also sniff the ground, the pole beneath the corner stop sign, and just about any other vertical object to determine whether other dogs have left their calling cards behind. A dog can tell a lot about another dog simply by sniffing a drop of that dog’s pee. For example, one sniff of a local canine potty place can tell a romance-seeking male dog not only whether ladies have been in the area but also whether those ladies are in the mood for love (in other words, whether they’re in heat).

Deciding When to Grant More Freedom

The fact that your dog has become a housetraining ace doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s ready to have full run of your house. Many housetraining graduates still need to have their access to their homes restricted. The reasons such restrictions may be necessary basically boil down to two: Either your puppy isn’t old enough to be considered truly housetrained, or she’s not dependable enough to leave your stuff alone when she’s left alone.

The age factor: How old is old enough?

One issue you need to keep in mind when determining whether your little pooch is ready for more freedom is age. Even if your puppy shows signs of being a housetraining prodigy, think twice about declaring her fully housetrained if she’s less than 6 months old.

A puppy under the age of 6 months may know when and where it’s okay to potty, but she may not always be physically able to keep from occasionally anointing your carpet or making a deposit on your floor — especially if she doesn’t have fairly frequent access to her designated bathroom.

So even if your precocious little darling hasn’t had an accident in weeks, don’t assume that she can hold it at any and all times. And don’t push the outer edge of her potty endurance envelope. Continue to keep her confined when you can’t supervise her until she at least passes her half-year birthday.

Even after you decide to loosen the reins a bit, give her only a little unsupervised freedom at a time. Just as you wouldn’t let a newly licensed teenage driver attempt a cross-country trip immediately, you shouldn’t let a newly housetrained puppy have immediate access to your entire house all day.

Confine your housetraining graduate to one or two rooms for a couple of hours or so and see how she does. Watch to see not only whether she holds her poop and pee but also whether she decides to dig or chew on any forbidden household objects. If she passes muster, gradually give her more freedom. But as with human children, don’t give your dog too much freedom too soon.

The responsibility factor: Should she have freedom of the house?

Another point to consider when deciding to give your dog more roaming rights is dependability. Even if your dog or puppy has mastered the fine art of housetraining, that doesn’t mean she should have total freedom of the house — at least not when you’re out of the house. That depends on her maturity level and history of behavior when left alone.

Even if your housetraining ace knows not to do her business inside your domicile, she may indulge her desire to make other mischief in said domicile. Allie, my Golden Retriever, is a case in point. Even after she became a housetraining graduate, she would cause other problems, such as going into the garbage, scratching on the sofa (and pulling out the stuffing), chewing the TV remote, unwinding toilet paper, and shredding magazines within her reach, sometimes right under our very noses.

How do you determine whether your dog is ready to be left unsupervised in the house? You probably need to engage in a little trial and error. Try leaving her alone for brief periods of time and see how she does. Initially start at 5 minutes and gradually increase to up to 30 minutes. If she hasn’t started wreaking havoc in 30 minutes, she’s probably ready to spend alone time outside the crate. Even then, though, proceed cautiously and reduce temptation. Here’s how:

• Start slow. Begin your dog’s road to freedom by giving her access to only one or two rooms in the house while you’re away. If she doesn’t engage in destructive or otherwise undesirable behavior, you can gradually allow her to spend time in more rooms of the house.
• Remove temptation. Your dog’s chances of handling her newly bestowed freedom successfully increase if you set her up for that success. So if you know she likes to chew up toilet paper, keep your bathroom door closed. If she’s a champion counter-surfer, make sure no food’s left out on your kitchen counter. If she likes to raid the garbage, block access to the garbage can. If laundry is her thing, keep the laundry room door closed and block her access to all clothes hampers. You get the idea.
• Secure items before leaving. At least in the initial stages of allowing your dog freedom of the house, take the time before you leave to make sure you haven’t left any temptations for her.

My family and I quickly learned to reduce Allie’s environmental temptations by closing bathroom doors, blocking off the garbage can with barstools and the sofa with dining chairs, and putting magazines and TV remotes beyond her reach. But for 4 years or so thereafter, we also crated Allie (using the nighty-night cue I describe in Chapter 5) whenever we left the house just to protect our stuff from the ravages of her paws and chompers. Only since she turned 5 and started showing some semblance of doggie dignity and respect for our possessions while we were in the house — and after she successfully dealt with short increments of freedom when we left the house — did we begin to allow her freedom of the house any time we went out, no matter how long we were gone. And she’s done fine — notwithstanding the shredded magazine that I found on the floor after I got back from running errands this morning. But that was my bad: I should’ve put it out of her reach before I left.