A while back, I was feeling like an expert on the subject. I even posted a couple of times the steps that we were taking. We went through about two weeks without a single "accident" - unless she managed to hide one from us. I thought we had it made. To the best of my recollection, she was about 12 weeks old at the time.
Now it's a short time later (she's 4 months old now) and for the past two or three weeks, there have a great number of accidents. Some even seem like absolute defiance. I realize that she is still very young to be expecting perfection, and I don't. But sometimes she is absolutely impossible to understand. She'll be outside with my wife for 10-20 minutes and refuse to go. Then she'll come in the house and pee on the floor almost immediately. This morning was particularly incomprehensible. I took her out and she peed very quickly - but I know her schedule well enough to know that she should be pooping, so I gave her more time. She kept going to the door to go back inside, and I kept setting her back on the grass. After a while, she started barking at me every time I set her on the grass and tried to get around me to get back to the door. She was certainly acting as if she didn't need to go and wanted me to know it. After repeating that at least a dozen times, she finally just calmly walked off to the corner of her potty area, pooped and trotted back for her treat and lots of praise.
She will often go to the door as if she wants to go out, but the door isn't visible to us from the places in the house where we usually are. I'm thinking of getting a bell (either hanging on a ribbon by the door or one of the wireless doorbells available for dogs) and seeing if we can get her trained to use it to tell she needs to go.
I'm sorry that I've taken on space on your thread and not come up with an answer for you. Look at the threads in YT, though, and you'll see there are a LOT of them about housetraining. Obviously, it is something of a problem with a lot of little dogs. |