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E-mail received at dog fun on 30/08/01.

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Just found your great site. Wonderful information!

I have a 4 month old Old English Sheepdog/Border Collie mix male.

He is a future replacement for an older incontinent and problem cursed collie.

Among the other ills, the older collie leaks urin around the garage.

The young puppie thinks it is okay to urinate when ever and where ever it might be in the garage.

How best to overcome this training problem. I cannot catch the dog every time it urinates and the problem seems to be getting worse.

Thank you D Palmer

Jade's reply.

Dear D Plalmer,
Thank you for your email. I don't know of any easy answer to this problem as clearly the puppy will be learning this behaviour from the older dog. If both dogs are left unattended you will have no control over what happens with obvious results.

I do however have a suggestion, accept for the short term that your puppy will urinate in the garage. Instead of trying to stop him give him one area of the garage, put down a piece of board with paper on it and encourage him to use this to urinate on. This will be easy to clean and will also be training him to use a specific area. As he gets older he will start to have better bladder control and should want to go less frequently. Once you have got him into this habit you should then start to work very hard on taking him outside at regular intervals when ever you can, making sure that he goes to the toilet. This will help because it will establish areas outside that smell of urine to your dog, this in turn will help to stimulate him to use these areas as toilets. It will also be helpful because the less urine that is inside him the less that he will have to be caught short in the
garage. Once you can start to get some control over his habits you can then start to move the board outside on occasions and gradually move it further away from the garage. Hopefully he will start to learn that he should wait to get to the board and then to the garden as time goes on.

The added problem in your situation will be the confused signals that will be learned from the other dog but hopefully he will start to learn what you want from him. One of the big keys to making any training work is to keep everything positive. You should avoid telling him off when he has accidents as unless you actually catch him urinating he will not understand why he is in trouble and will only become upset and probably urinate more frequently. You should however make a big fuss when he does what you want him to do. If you take him into the garden and he goes to the toilet make a fuss, give him a treat or a pat etc. this will make him think wow if I go to the toilet outside I can have a treat great.

I don't think that you can expect a quick fix to the problem, but I am sure that you will get there given time. I hope that this will be of help to you.

All the best, Jade the Doberman

As with the rest of Dog Fun we are only offering advice, we have learned a lot through our own experience and would like to further that knowledge with your help. If you have any good tips or advice that would help dog owners drop us a line to jade@dogfun.co.uk and we will display your advice and give you credit for your help!