Dear Auntie Awesome: I feel like an idiot. I’ve followed all the advice I can find about housebreaking dogs, and still no luck. Everyone says keeping her in a crate should do the trick. My puppy totally hates her crate. She pees and poops in it, which all the experts say she shouldn’t be doing. What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions as to what else I can try? My husband is threatening to get rid of my dog. I love my puppy, but my husband has a point. I’m desperate.
Pooped in Toronto
Dear Pooped: Many of those offering advice on this topic seem unaware that there are dogs for whom the traditional methods of housebreaking don’t work. If you are unlucky enough to draw a dog who falls within that very small group, I guarantee, you will feel like an abject failure.
How do I know this? Because I was an abject failure trying to housebreak my first real dog even though I followed all the expert advice.
You need an alternative for your dog. Alternatives are hard to find. But you came to the right place.
I’m going to tell you about an alternative can result in success over as short a period of time as 48 hours.
I know. It sounds impossible. But I know from personal experience, it is possible.
You will read over and over again that it is natural for a puppy to adapt to housetraining. Puppies and their den are kept clean by their mothers. The puppies therefore naturally want to be clean. You can use this universal truth to get them housebroken.
All it takes is patience, consistency and a little effort. And a crate.
In a nutshell, the usual advice is to:
(a) Most importantly, keep your puppy confined to a suitably sized crate whenever you’re not there. This is the key to success. The puppy won’t soil in the crate, because it’s her den, and she is naturally clean.
(b) Feed your puppy on a schedule.
(c) Take her out to where you want her to do her business as soon as she has finished eating. Also take her out first thing in the morning, after she has napped, and before she goes to bed at night. If she shows signs that she needs to go at any time, then take her out. Always take her to the same place. Wait quietly until she goes. You might add a command like, “Do your business” or “Hurry up”. She will start to associate those words with peeing and pooping.
(d) Praise and reward her for going in the right spot. Ignore mistakes unless you actually catch her in the act. Then, don’t scold but startle her (hopefully she will stop), and run her outside to the chosen spot. Clean up any messes with a cleaner that will eliminate the smell. Otherwise she might be tempted to go back to that spot.
Easy peasey.
So what kind of a moron or lazy dog owner can’t housetrain a dog?
Although you may have been told over and over again that “you must be doing something wrong”, the truth is, if your dog has not been housebroken after a week of crate training, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’re not an idiot, and you’re not alone.
The only dog we raised from a puppy was my beloved Belgian Terverun, Toby. Before Toby, we had two different dogs given to us by two different well-meaning by misguided relatives and friends. We were then at a point in our lives where the last thing we needed was a puppy. After a lot of frustration, including bad experiences trying to housebreak them, we found other homes for them where people actually knew what they were doing.
With Toby, I was determined to do it right. I read everything I could lay my hands on about how to train puppies in every type of activity you could imagine. When it came to housebreaking, I found the rules I outlined above were being universally offered.
Here’s what happened with Toby.
We had a crate all ready for him when he arrived.
At bedtime we put him in the crate and retired for the night. Next morning, at the first sound from our new puppy, I was out of bed and racing downstairs to let him out. As soon as I got within nose distance it became painfully obvious that I was too late. Against all conventional wisdom, he had pooped and peed in his crate.
“Oh well,” I reasoned, “it’s his first night in a new place, without his mom and his littermates. Not surprising if he’s confused at first.”
Undaunted, I pulled on my rubber boots and took him to the spot in the backyard we had chosen as his pooping and peeing place. No business resulted, presumably because he had relieved himself in the warmth and comfort of his crate.
My optimism was unshaken. All the experts agreed, and all the experts couldn’t be wrong.
Nothing in any of the books or articles we had read so much as hinted that there might be exceptions to the infallible crate method. Not one word. Not one.
Unfortunately, no one had told this to Toby.
We fed him, and ran him outside again. Nothing. I took him for a walk. He did a little pee and I praised him profusely, using a high singsongy voice that would have guaranteed me a spot with the next Alvin and the Chipmunks road tour.
We crated him when we went out. We came back to find that he had peed and pooped in his crate again. We ran him outside. Nothing. We fed him. We ran him back outside. Nothing.
We experimented with the crate, putting paper in it. He pooped and peed. We put his bedding into it and took it out again when he pooped on the bedding.
We put his food and water into the crate. Surely he wouldn’t crap where his food and water were? Oh yeah he would.
We covered his crate. We tried it in different places around the house. Nothing made any difference. He restricted his food and water before he went into the crate.
After about a week, I called our vet for advice. “You must be doing something wrong,” he opined gravely after hearing my sad story. “The crate always works.”
“What exactly am I doing wrong?” I wanted to know. All he could offer was that perhaps the crate was too big. Toby wasn’t treating it like a den because he could poop and pee at one end and hunker down in the other.
I reported this to The General, who rigged up a partition. Toby pooped and peed in his newly cramped crate.
I called someone from the local obedience club. I told her my sad story. “That’s impossible. You must be doing something wrong.”
She had nothing more to offer, except to take his toys away when he went in the crate. By this time, Toby actively hated his crate, and the absence of anything to chew on merely resulted in him chewing the crate.
I called the breeder, and repeated my story yet again. “Hhm. You must be doing something wrong. The crate always works.”
After I stopped screaming, she offered to put me in touch with a police officer who was training Toby’s uncle to be a tracking dog.
He agreed that we were doing something wrong, but had no suggestions as to what it was. His idea was to put up a ‘scent post’ in the back yard. Male dogs like to pee against a barrier of some sort, so their scent will mark as high as possible. That’s why they pee on trees and fire hydrants and lamp posts.
If we put up a stick of some sort in our yard, maybe Toby would naturally gravitate to it to do his business. There was a commercial preparation we could buy, he told us, that would encourage Toby to go on the post. Once he peed on it, it would smell like his pee and he would want to continue peeing there.
The General pounded a slender post into the backyard, we bought the chemical and applied it liberally.
Toby ate the post.
“You need to give him a bigger reward him when he does it right,” said the behavioural specialist. “Try using a bit of cheese or dried liver when he goes, instead of just verbal praise.”
I cooked up a bunch of liver. Toby was treating our house like a toilet, and no commercial deodorizer on the market was having the desired effect. Now, oh goody, the sewer smell was augmented by an overlay of stinky liver odour.
The General’s retching over the obnoxious liver smell was for nothing. The stepped up positive reinforcement was a bust.
Toby was not housebroken, but it wasn’t because he was stupid. He quickly caught on that the production of body fluids resulted in a treat. He would squeeze out two drops of pee and look at me expectantly for his treat. Treat received, he take another step and squeeze out another drop of pee. When he got back to the comfort and convenience of home, he would lay down the big dog log he had been saving up, just specially for us.
This went on for months. I felt like the biggest loser in the history of dogs. How could these methods work for everyone but me and Toby? In the words of the immortal Jackie Gleason, “It’s gotta be me!”
Since everyone agreed I had to be doing something wrong, it followed that I had to be doing something wrong. It was just too bad for me that no one could tell me what that elusive ‘something’ was.
Finally, almost crying in the vet’s office when I was there with Toby for his booster shots, my vet told me he had “a girl” he sometimes consulted about really difficult behavioural problems.
But oh horror, it would be a long distance phone call.
We’re talking pre-internet here, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and fathers stood over teenagers with a stop watch to make sure their call to their boyfriend at university didn’t go over five minutes, because long distance calls were so expensive. I speak from experience.
My vet advised me to write out my story in advance, and have my questions ready to ask Katherine Houpt, the name of the ‘girl’. Talk fast, keep costs down. At that point I would gladly have robbed a bank to pay someone, anyone who could help me understand what the HELL I was missing.
I went home, wrote out my tale (although I could have recited it in my sleep by that point), and dialled the number. To my shock, the phone was answered “Cornell University”. I was so taken aback that ‘the girl”, who I figured was some dog trainer somewhere within a few hundred miles, was apparently connected with Cornell, that I actually hung up.
The General and I conferred. Would such an exalted personage as someone at Cornell take offence at being bothered by a couple of Canadian yokels who were failing at the basic task of housebreaking?
It was a measure of both our desperation and our determination to succeed that we decided to call back.
“Just a moment. I’ll connect you with Dr. Houpt.”
A cheerful woman’s voice came on the line a few minutes later. She listened to my long tale of woe.
Fully expecting the latest version of “You must be doing something wrong,” I almost broke down and cried when instead she said, “Oh you poor things. I may be able to help you with that”.
Dr. Houpt was literally the answer to our prayers.
She went on to tell me that for the 95% or so of dogs that are naturally clean, the crate is a great method and works like a charm. For the others though, it is the worst thing you could possibly do. In effect, you are teaching them to be even dirtier. Her view was that crate training should work within a week. If it doesn’t, abandon it, because to never will produce the desired result.
She proposed that we try another method, one she called the ‘umbilical cord’ technique. I did what she told me, and Toby was housebroken over the course of a weekend.
Here’s what Dr, Houpt told us to do.
1. Find a time when we could devote at least 48 hours, and maybe even three days, to this project. One of us – that would be me – would need to be within ten feet of our dog the entire time, so I had to clear my calendar.
2. Get a ten foot lead, or piece of rope. Attach one end to Toby’s collar and tie the other around my waist.
3. At the first sign that Toby was about to relieve himself, I was to yell “No!”, preferably while looking right into his eyes, and rush him outside. The usual rewards and praise would follow if he did the act in the specified place, or even completed it in the specified place.
Dr. Houpt also suggested that we continue saying the command word to reinforce the training. We were using “Hurry up”.
4. At night, we were to use a shorter lead (six feet) and tie Toby to a corner of our bed.
The General warned me to be careful where I put my feet when I got up in the morning.
In the morning though, there was nothing but a puppy whining and tugging at the lead. I raced Toby outside, he peed in the designated spot, and I hugged him in wild joy.
We were so worn down by the failures of the past months, it was difficult to accept that maybe at long last, something was working.
You see dear Pooped Out, while dogs like Toby and yours have no qualms about soiling their own space, they draw the line at doing it in front of you, or in the space you are occupying. By keeping him this close to us and not isolating him in a crate, we were making him feel part of our little pack. He began to realize that the whole house was the pack den.
Keeping the dog at your side does a couple of things of other things. As you watch him, you learn the signs that your dog is about to go. Catching him in the act, then lavishly praising him for going where you want him to, is immediate reinforcement and helps him to understand what you want from him.
He doesn’t have a chance to make a mistake. You thereby condition him to only going in the designated spots.
It was a very long and stressful weekend for both Toby and me. He was increasingly unhappy with being literally tied to my apron strings. I was increasingly bored with watching him for signs of needing a bathroom break and my own lack of freedom from an antsy, bored dog.
After the third successful night, we decided to make the great experiment. I untied the lead, and let Toby have full run of the house. No crate. No confinement of any sort.
I still fully expected to awake to the demoralising odour of dog shit. Instead, I opened my eyes at first light to see Toby standing at the bedside, grinning and wagging his tail. He had actually come upstairs from his preferred sleeping spot on the cool tile by the front door, to wake me up.
I jumped out of bed, raced downstairs and let him out to the back yard. Then I performed an inspection of the house. Nothing.
From then on, even in old age when he was suffering from cancer of the bowel, my Toby never made another mess.
He still hated crates with a passion he brought to little else. I have to say that by that point, so did I. I never forced him again to go in it, even though it made things difficult at dog shows.
Toby was lucky. In many another household, people would simply have given up, and either returned him to the breeder, dropped him off at the nearest shelter, or even had him put down.
I hope anyone who reads this will spread the word.
Not every dog can be housebroken with a little praise and confinement to a crate.
The standard advice about crates, routine, positive reinforcement and patience is still good advice. But if you find the crate is not working for your puppy, don’t take it to heart as your failure. There are other ways, and this is one.
Good luck.