05 FebEpisode 118 | The dog is peeing inside and it’s totally okay: A family’s practical and economical approach to housetraining a puppy
Annie has a toddler, a husband who is a busy guy, and a toddler. It's freezing outside, the dog hates the cold weather, and Annie's mobility isn't great at the moment: She's pregnant and lives in a walkup. All this resulted in her family's inability to get the puppy, Poppy, on the six or so walks a day that she, as a dog trainer, knows would be needed to teach her to go outside on the city streets. The issue could be solved by hiring a dog walker to come a few times a day, but Annie calculated that this would cost at least a thousand dollars a month. So, Annie came up with a plan to teach Poppy to go on an indoor pottying spot -- one that could ultimately be transferred to the outside -- and to use her roof deck some of the time, while also making sure she goes out on the street at least once or twice a day, even if she isn't "bathrooming" out there.
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Transcript:
Annie:
So you're a dog trainer. You get a dog, you teach the dog to pee and poop outside. End of story. Right? Well, I wanted to talk a little bit today about my experience housetraining my new puppy Poppy, who we got just about five weeks ago. She is maybe like six, six and a half months, a Chihuahua mix. Actually, we just got her DNA results back. She's a Chihuahua, Chow, Cocker spaniel, pitbull, beagle, boxer, Rottweiler mix, but I think she's mostly Chihuahua.
And she's been a real dream. She is just a very sweet, affectionate dog, very tolerant of my toddler. Very loving with my toddler. Really the most cuddly kissy dog I think I've ever encountered. All she wants to do is sit in someone's lap. And by and large, she's a really quick learner. I think when you work with a lot of dogs doing the same exercises over and over and over as I have done, you start to get a sense of how quick a dog is.
It must be like that when you're working with people too. If you do the same task with 5,000 people, you start to get a certain idea of a certain kind of baseline intelligence and whether or not someone is above or below that. And I'd say she's pretty quick. She's pretty smart. Loves her crate, goes into her crate no problem and learns new things pretty quickly.
But I don't know if she had ever gone to the bathroom — it's funny how we say go to the bathroom for peeing and pooping for dogs when they're not actually going into a bathroom, but let's go with that euphemism. I don't know if she'd ever gone outside. She came from a shelter in Alabama. She was dropped off there with her parents and two sisters. Although I think whoever dropped her off just had her parents there to get spayed and neutered and ended up taking the parents back.
So I think she must have been in some kind of home up until she was in the shelter. So I don't know what, what her home life was like. And I don't think she was in the shelter for very long. She then was brought from Alabama to New York, stayed with a foster here for a little bit. I don't think the foster had her go outside at all. And the foster reported, she was kind of like a C minus, I think the way she put it, when it came to hitting wee wee pads.
And when I got her, she was about a week away from finishing all of her shots. I'm a big believer in getting dogs out early. I think it's really important that they start to learn about the world around them and that you start to establish habits really as early on as possible for the sake of socialization.
And Poppy, by the time we got her, she was already about five months. Well out of that socialization window that we talk about. The prime socialization period being really between like eight and 12 weeks with the cutoff of puppy socialization usually being considered around like 20 weeks. So we were getting started pretty late in the game.
And at School for the Dogs, we definitely advocate getting dogs out, even on the city streets before they've had all of their shots, of course, doing so carefully. Cleaning their paws when you come back in. This is the recommendation of the American Veterinary Society of Animal behavior. Often recommend people look at their position paper because, as trainers, it can feel tricky for us to be contradicting people's vets. A lot of times vets put the fear of God in people when it comes to letting their dog go out on the city streets before getting all their shots.
But the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior’s position, which I am behind basically says that the risk of not exposing a puppy to all the things we need to expose them to, and that could lead to behavior problems that could ultimately lead to relinquishing a dog and possibly euthanasia, that those risks far outweigh the risk of your dog getting parvo or lepto, or the other things that we worry about them getting after they've had at least one round of shots.
So all of that is to say that I did bring her out on the streets right away, mindfully. And she did really well on the leash, out on the sidewalk. I live in a very, very busy part of Manhattan. And the thing she was most scared of was an automatic door at a building near us. Which upon reflection I thought is pretty weird that these doors open and closed as they do. But I had a tube of peanut butter with me, and we stood near that open and closing door for a little while until she seemed okay with it, licking peanut butter the whole time. Did great.
And so, took her out on a bunch of walks early on. Carried her some of the time. I have a really great dog backpack. So we spent some time outside with her in the dog backpack. But I also put some wee wee pads down inside for her, just in one spot. Cause I think if you're going to use wee wee pads, it's best to have one designated spot rather than carpeting your home with them. And when it was time to really start taking her out for walks on a more regular basis after she had all of her shots I said to my husband, okay, like we need to come up with a really a really good walk schedule.
Now this is where all kinds of complicating factors come into place. First of all, it's really cold in New York right now. The last few days of this week, we had a huge snow storm. But even before that, the temperature has been below freezing for much of the time that we have had Poppy. And I think getting a puppy during the coldest part of the year is hard. If I was going to suggest when someone should get a puppy, I would probably say get the dog in the springtime so that you have the most mild months of the year ahead of you to work on housebreaking.
But there was a major reason why we didn't want to wait until spring to get a puppy, and the reason is that I'm pregnant. I am due in July. And so I thought if we could get a dog earlier as opposed to later, it would be better to have some months before the new baby comes, where we could really focus on the dog rather than waiting till the spring or even the summer and having to juggle a new baby plus a puppy.
And my pregnancy definitely also plays into some of the complicating factors to what would be my normal idea of how we should plan this dog's walk schedule. Only because I've been sleeping really poorly and I am pretty exhausted and I'm already pretty huge. And we live in a two-story walk-up. And getting the dog and myself, and often my toddler bundled up and outside even just to walk around the block, it's doable, but it takes a lot out of me.
And I would say, I think I have one good walk in me for this dog per day. And a lot of the time I have to bring my daughter with me if I'm walking the dog, because I can't leave a two year old home alone. So it just complicates the matter, as opposed to when I got my old dog Amos. I was single, I lived by myself and a ground floor apartment. It really was not hard for me to get them out on five or six short walks a day. It just takes a lot more now, a lot more time and energy.
So I said to my husband, I really think you need to take on the lion's share responsibility of making sure Poppy is getting walks because I just don't think I have it in me to get her out as much as she needs to go out. And my husband's last experience with a dog was our old dog Amos who really only needed to go out twice a day. And he also was very happy to go out on our back deck. We have a nice size deck.
So I think Jason was kind of spoiled by this and surprised at me saying, okay, we're going to have to start taking this dog for walks, you know, four or five, six times a day if we really want to get her housetrained. But at first he was like, okay, I don't think this'll be a problem. First thing in the morning, definitely I'm going to wake up — he always wakes up first — and I'll get her outside and it'll be great for both of them.
I think that actually happened maybe one time. His intentions were good, but he too was like, you know, having a toddler complicates things because you sleep later than I do. Meaning me, which I do because I sleep so poorly at night. I sleep later. So he's like, what if Magnolia wakes up and you're asleep still and I'm out, plus the morning hours are the only time that I have to myself, la la la la. So this, that, and the other reason he kind of fell down on this promise to take her out first thing in the morning.
And I was actually okay with this. I know it sounds like I'm talking about what was going to wind up being an argument, but it wasn't really. I mean, I have my own different reasons why I'm having a hard time getting her out as much as I would like to. And as a dog trainer, I don't think there is one right way to house train a dog. I mean, what does house training mean? It means we want the dog to pee and poop where we want them to, and perhaps when we want them to, but that doesn't necessarily have to be on the sidewalk, right?
And he said to me like, well, if we really were going to get her to go outside, solely outside, what would we need to do? Like how do people who work and have little kids and have crazy schedules like we do, and have all these complicating factors, how do they house train their dogs? I said, well, in a lot of cases, they hire dog walkers.
But if you're house training a dog and you really want to be giving them tons of short opportunities to go outside on the street, that might mean having to have a dog walker come three or four times a day, if you're not going to be doing it yourself. And in the in-between times, the dog needs to be in a crate or leashed inside with you or just monitored so that they're not going in what you've decided is the wrong place, the wrong place being inside.
And he was like, well, what would that look like financially and logistically? And I said, I think probably in New York City, the best price we could get on a dog walker would be like $15 for a 15 minute walk. And if you're looking at doing that, gosh, four times a day, that's $60 a day times five times a week, that's $300 a week. So well over a thousand dollars a month to have someone take on only just part of this job for you. And he definitely experienced some sticker shock at that estimate that I came up with.
So I decided to see if I could be creative and think about how we could deal with this dog's pee and poop without upsetting our lives or our finances too much. And the solution I've come up with so far, well, I'll lay it out, but I also want to point out that life changes. Dogs change. I do think it's a good idea early on in your relationship with a new dog in your home to set things up the way that you expect things are going to be to establish habits and patterns that you would like to see can you into the future.
But that said, I'm not sure that this is going to be the long-term solution for us with Poppy. I don't know what our lives will look like with a new baby. I don't know what our lives will look like if we ever live somewhere else. Maybe we will come into a lot of money, and paying over a thousand dollars a month for dog-walking won't be any kind of issue. Who knows. So what I'm going to explain as our current setup may not be our forever set up.
And I should mention that every time we've taken her out on the sidewalk, she hasn't gone. She's never gone outside on the sidewalk. She has gone outside on our back deck. Now, if it was absolutely necessary that she go out on the sidewalk, I think the solution would be to be getting her out there a whole lot to be experimenting with lots of different surfaces outside. There are not a whole lot of surfaces within a block or so of our apartment, unfortunately, not a lot of grass.
But to yeah, just to be getting her out, you know, five, six, seven times a day for short walks, if necessary, really making sure she's tethered when not outside or crated when not outside. That would be my suggestion. But she's cold outside. And it doesn't feel to me like I need to be forcing her to be outside for hours and hours a day to make bathrooming something that happens outside right now.
So I thought, well, you know, if I was advising a client, I would say, just take her for walks out on the deck. It doesn't have to be out on the sidewalk. So I've been trying to do that at least once a day. I've committed myself to getting her out on the sidewalk myself, once a day, pretty much every day. Because I think it's really important that she get used to the streets of New York City, even if she isn't gonna pee and poop out there.
Some days, she seems pretty miserable. I bundle her up, but she's mostly Chihuahua, not a cold weather dog, originally from the South. And I also basically hired my babysitters to take her out, ideally once a day. And it's funny because I'm usually pretty firm with my clients about not asking like a local kid or something to walk the dog. I think you should hire a dog walker who is insured, who has experience. Your dog is an important part of your life and you want your dog to be in very safe hands.
And yet I am having my 16 and 20 year old babysitters who are basically our neighbors who, they've kind of over the last year become pseudo daughters of mine to do it. Cause I sort of feel like they're part of our family. I trust them to that extent. Obviously I trust them out on the street with my daughter. They're around all the time. They know the dog and I'm home when they're picking her up. So I don't feel like I'm letting someone into my home, especially someone I don't know.
And I'm also very clear about how I want them to walk her. I tell them, I don't want her to be saying hi to other dogs on the street. Not because I'm necessarily against this, but puppies can be really annoying to other dogs on the street. I don't want there to be any kind of incident or another dog comes at her, especially with these girls handling her rather than me. And I give them peanut butter or a tube of Kalles Cod Roe which Poppy likes a lot.
I have them go out with that. And I say, if you see another dog just lead Poppy past that dog on the opposite side with this tube of yumminess in order to help teach her that other dogs are an okay thing. That other dogs are a signal to pay attention to the human I'm with, and to get her past the other dog. I have occasionally let her say hi to other dogs on the street when I'm with her. But I don't really want my babysitters letting that happen.
So I have, I have set down a lot of ground rules. They just take her around the block. Sometimes I think they probably only get halfway around the block, which is also fine. The idea is just to get her out even just a few minutes a day both with me and with my sitters or at the very least one or the other.
Now the rest of the time, if she's not going out on our deck, she is going inside. But what I've done is I've replaced the wee wee pads with grass patches. I am using the company Doggie Lawn. Haven't experimented with a lot of companies. I'm pretty okay with their service so far, except was disappointed by the verbiage in the pamphlet that comes with their first delivery. That talks all about how, Oh gosh, let me see if I can even find it here.
I actually posted it in our app and actually there's a deal section in the app where there is a coupon for Doggie Lawn. But this is what it says in their pamphlet, this is one of the parts:
My dog still hasn't gone after several hours. How long is this going to take? Well, let's start with a bit of background on dog behavior. Dogs use their urine as a tool to mark their territory, so they don't necessarily have to “go” in the same way you have to go. When they paw at the door and say, take me out, I have to go, they are training you to take them on a walk. But you are the alpha, and you decide when and where they pee or poo.
Your dog can hold it for a long time, much longer than you think. Because of this it's routine for dogs to hold it well into the evening on the first training day or even overnight. Don't worry, your dog will have an accident before they hurt themselves by holding it. In our experience if your dog thinks they're going to be taken on a walk, they will hold it. Once they give up on walking and waiting for a walk, the real training can occur.
As you can imagine, this may take many hours to happen, but it will happen. Be the alpha and be patient. One dog we trained finally peed at noon on the second day. This is extreme, but it goes to show you how dogs’ pee works.
Okay. So I disagree with a lot of parts of this and I don't think it's healthy to force your dog to hold their pee for crazy long periods of time. So anyway, if you buy their product, ignore everything that's in the pamphlet that comes with it. But so far I'm pretty happy with it. It's basically a tray of grass. You buy the tray separately, they ship the grass in like a box in a roll.
I started out with one, two foot square piece of grass and then kind of accidentally, I think, scheduled two deliveries, very close to each other. They're supposed to come every other week, but I ended up with two of these two by two pieces of, what do you call it? I guess like turf, sod. And put them next to each other, so it's now a two by four area, and I kind of liked that better. I think it gives Poppy a better chance of getting on the grass. It fits the spot that I have it in better.
So I actually switched to order a two by four piece that they have, which is not that much more expensive. I think the two by two, one was something like $30 every other week. And then the two by four one was like $34 every other week. And then you buy the tray one time, which is like another $20 or something like that. So you're looking at a total, after you buy the tray, around $70 a month.
And the reason I decided that I wanted to teach her to go on grass inside rather than on a wee wee pad or in litter, they do make litter for dogs, is because ideally I would like this to translate to her going outside. If not all of the time, at least some of the time, and she will find some grass outside that would like her to have developed a habit of going on.
Whereas I think if you keep dogs on wee wee pads, they're more likely to develop the habit of going on anything that's sort of plush inside. And that can translate to them being inclined to go on carpets or whatever else might be not a hard floor in your house or in other people's homes. I also just sort of aesthetically would prefer to have grass in my home than have wee wee pads, which are kind of like, I don't know, they're kind of like flat diapers in my mind.
And wee wee pads, you pretty much have to pick them up as soon as the dog pees on them. Whereas the grass patch, the pee soaks in, I change the piece of sod every other week and just pick up the poop every day when she goes. It's funny, Magnolia calls, poop, Pop, and she points to it and she says pop, which is funny, cause the dog's name is Poppy. So it's like Poppy makes pop.
But I had been using wee wee pads at first. I put the sod where the wee wee pads had been and she was pretty immediately interested in going on it. It does come with a little spray that you're supposed to put on that smells, I guess, like urine, if you're a dog, I didn't sniff it too closely. I've also, I'm seeing people recommend putting your own pee on these grass patches.
I don't know if any of this was necessary. She seemed to get it right away.
She also had another spot in our living room that she liked to go, on our rug in there. And she also had a spot that was sort of close to the grass that she would that she was liking to go in. So it was almost on the grass, but not quite.
So I did a couple of things. I picked up all of our rugs because I wanted there to be like one soft, cushy, nice spot for her to go on in the house and figured it would decrease the likelihood of her going in the wrong space if there were no rugs down. I also bought a couple inexpensive baby gates, like the kind that sort of stand on their own, you can move around. Actually I already had a few baby gates because I have a toddler.
Our apartment’s sort of like a loft. So there are no real doors to close, so really necessary for us to be able to control space, both with a dog and with a kid. I put a baby gate to cordon off our living room, which is the spot I didn't want her to go, where she was often going. And basically just started keeping her with me in our bedroom, which is where I work, and also where her grass patch is, most of the day when I'm home. It's also where her crate is. And there's not a huge amount of area in the bedroom for her to like wander around in and get into trouble.
I also put up a baby gate kind of right next to the grass patch, to sort of define that area. And then, on the other side of the gate, in the spot where she was sometimes still going, I put down a couple like grates that I had. I think they were old dividers that come inside of metal crates that we had sitting around for some reason, I guess, from my work. Basically like metal grid things. I don't know what else you would call it.
I think you could also use flattened folding chairs or window screens. Just something flat that a dog wouldn't be particularly interested in standing on. I put those on the ground to deter her from going in that area. And it totally worked. Between having the stuff on the ground and having the baby gate kind of abutting the the grass, I was able to help her define the bathroom area pretty well.
And after about, I don't know, maybe 10 days of having those grates on the ground, I picked them up and I actually put her bed in that area reasoning that she wouldn't want to pee and poop on her bed. And actually the way that I had the baby gates kind of made a perfect little nook for her bed right next to her pottying area. I'll post a picture maybe in the podcast section of the community app.
So overall the system has been working really well. She has had, Hmm, maybe only two accidents in the last three weeks that we've had this setup going. Still hasn't gone outside. I do try and take her out on the deck every day. Sometimes she goes out there, but again, she seems really put off by the cold. So I assume the outside stuff is only going to get easier as the weather gets better.
And another reason why I wanted to get her used to going on the grass is because eventually I'd figured we can put that grass or, or at least some grass outside on our deck and she will go there. Whereas our old dog Amos kind of pooped all over our deck, which, I dunno, sort of unsightly to go out and see poop all over the place. And it's hard to keep on top of picking it up.
And of course the next step also, when it gets nicer out, we'll be teaching her to let us know when she wants to go out. And also maybe putting in a doggy door. I'm not quite sure how to do that logistically, but I like the idea of her being able to go out whenever she wants.
Something else that I am planning to do is to buy some paving stones. This is an idea that my friend Jay Andoors, who's a trainer in New York city and a dog groomer, fellow Karen Pryor Academy graduate came up with, which I think is so brilliant, which is to teach a dog to go basically on cement inside. If you want to eventually teach them to go on cement outside, you certainly could start inside.
I looked into pouring a bit of cement to create like a sort of cement patch area. Couldn't quite figure out how to do that without a lot of trouble. But then I came up with the idea of just getting some paving stones, which are super cheap. They're like $2 for square foot at Home Depot. So I just ordered like 8 or 10 of those. And I'm thinking that I will put those down near the bit of grass that I have and see if she has any interest in going there.
Oh, you know, another little tip I wanted to mention if you're working on getting your dog to go inside or outside, is of course notice their habits. At first, I was using an app called Puddle and Pile where you can put in when your dog pees and poops, and when they have an accident, and when you feed them, and it'll start reminding you, it’ll calculate when they probably need to go out.
I was using that for a little while and then I kind of fell off the wagon with it, but just on my own, I noticed that she tended to run to go to the bathroom pretty quickly after she ate or drank. So I would make sure to watch her when she was eating or drinking and then scurry her over to the appropriate pottying area and kind of corral her there with the baby gates an my body, or even put her on a leash and put her in that area, or bring her out on our deck, if not outside. Like I said, outside hasn't been a place for her to actually go out on the street.
And I think, I think that's probably true of most dogs. I think most dogs will go pretty quickly after they eat. But certainly keeping some kind of log can be helpful. And I do think this app is pretty neat, and of course I throw her a party after she goes. Which is pretty easy to do regularly because my desk is only a few feet from her grass patch. And I keep treats on my desk for her.
And I don't say anything as she's going. I don't want to interrupt the process, but as soon as she goes, I am super enthusiastic, and I give her treats. Or if I don't have treats on me, I at least give her lots of cuddles and playtime.
I do try and give a potty word as she's going, but I don't, again, I don't want to disrupt her. So I will say like, go potty one time as she's going. Cause I'm trying to forge that association that go potty means do this thing that you're doing. But the grass itself is becoming a cue for her to go. So I'm not too stressed out about that.
So that is my process. There have been no arguments between me and my husband about any of it. He is completely on board with this plan. Money wise, I don't know. I mean, between what I'm paying my sitters to take her out most days and what we're paying for the grass patch, we're spending definitely less than a hundred dollars a week. Probably closer to $50, $60 a week.
And again, I don't know if this is going to be the setup forever. I think things might change as the weather improves. Things might change when I'm not pregnant and I'm a little bit more mobile. Things might change for any number of reasons, but for the moment, this is what we're doing and it's working out.
