First just to make it easier on yourself you may want to teach her to go on command as Rem&Silkmom said. How I did this is I would take her out when I thought she needed to go tel her "go potty" wait for maybe 5 minutes then go back in no matter what. If while she was out she so much as sniffed the ground(a sign of going) I would start praising her. Then if she actually went I would really really praise her. If she didn't go then after about 10 minutes I would take her back out and do the whole thing again. I don't let her stay out too long, if we are out there for her to go potty then that's all she gets to do. She isn't going to stay out there all day smelling the wind(which she can do for 15 minutes nonstop).
Also one thing that I did, I don't know if anyone else did this or not. When Reagan would go inside I would take her to the spot tell her no then put her in her pet taxi, kind of a time out I guess. She wouldn't stay in for very long maybe 5-10 minutes sometimes I would forget about her and about 15-20 minutes later she kind of whine a little just to let me know she was still in there. A friend of mine told me that you don't want you dog to see you cleaning up after her(I don't know why) so this allowed me to clean up the mess with Reagan out of site. Also sometimes it was a time out for Reagan and sometimes it seemed like more of a time out for me, because sometimes when she would go on the floor I would get so frustrated (especially like now when she really knows better) so it allowed me time to clean it up without her and just kind of calm down. I honestly think this helps because at the point that we thought Reagan pretty much got it we kind of slacked up on the timeouts and I noticed that the more I slacked up the more accidents came. Again I don't know if anyone else did this or if anyone else would agree or even recommend it but it did seem to help for me. If you do decide to try the timeouts I hope they work. If not I hope you find another way that works for you.
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Courtney |