Quote:
Originally Posted by seneedha  Thanks for the replies!
For the first question, he is 11 months old. We feed him Canidae All Life Stage dry food, which is what he has always been on.
I definately don't want him having a negative association to his crate, as he enjoys it as his "home" now and we've had a rather long road getting there. We stay outside with him at least 15-20 minutes. If he doesn't do both, we crate him (if we're leaving) or crate him about 15 minutes then take him back outside to try again. The main problem we're having is knowing how long is the right amount of time to stay outside. I have no way of telling when he may need to poop once and that be all or need to twice.
You speak of him having too much freedom being that young, at what age do you think he'll be capable of enough bowel control to have more freedom? I'm not clear as to what ages are associated with what classification for puppy, adult, etc. I've tried searching for this, but haven't found any really clear results.
For an update, we have left him out while we've been gone ~4 hours the last 2 days and he has done great! Only once he had a little bit of an accident. We were really proud of him!  |
Oops- I didn't realize he was 11 months old. I was thinking he was younger.
I can only speak from personal experience but Jackson began having free roam of the house at around 5 months old. He wasn't 100% potty trained BUT... he still to this day has never had an accident while we weren't home or chewed or got into anything (when we ARE home, was a different story.. lol). I don't know if I was just lucky, or just really diligent with his training. I got him when I was on winter break so I had 3 full weeks to really dedicate to the potty training.
I don't really know the ages either. I mean mentally, most 11 month old dogs are still "puppies.'" I know most people feed puppy food until 1 year old and then switch to adult food... but smaller dogs are often done growing before that. I'm fairly certain that any dog over 7 years old is "senior." Maybe? Heck, I don't know lol.