This is not a post about how to stop your puppy piddling on the carpet. If you need help with that, I’m sure there are lots of other great resources out there on the internet for this. My basic approach is to confine the pup when he’s not supervised, take him outside very frequently when he is, and gradually extend his level of freedom.
Agility dogs lead a slightly different life to most pets. They often travel in the car for several hours at a time (and stay the night in there too), and are required to toilet on a short time frame in unfamiliar, high-distraction settings. There are a few extra things you can do with your toilet training to help make these situations easier for both of you.
Get It On Cue
I always thought this was kind of lame, until my family got a puppy that had already been trained to toilet on a verbal cue by his breeder. It was magic. All my dogs since then have learned to “Be Quick” on cue. Able’s breeder had already started saying “Hurry Up”, but I feel like that’s something I might accidentally say in other situations, so I am now teaching him to “Be Quick” as well.
Having it on cue is very handy when you’re in a hurry. It’s also useful to encourage your dog to toilet in an unfamiliar location – something that a lot of dogs (particularly small dogs) seem to be reluctant to do at first.
I got my last dog Riki off a farm as an adult dog. She had never been inside before and so wasn’t toilet trained. She learned not to go in the house fairly quickly, but hasn’t really cottoned on that indoor agility venues and other buildings are also no-go zones. I’ve found my “Be Quick” cue very helpful for this problem too. I can interrupt her if I see she’s about to go, quickly rush her away to somewhere more appropriate, and use my cue to let her know that this is where I want her to go. Happy dog and happy owner!
This is a deceptively simple thing to train – you just observe your puppy when you take him outside to go toilet, and say “Be Quick” a split second before you think he’s about to go (e.g. as he’s circling or lowering himself down). Keep it up for a few weeks and you’ll find that you have a puppy who will often perform on cue.
Poos Before Playtime
I grew up in a household of dogs that had to be taken for a half-hour walk before any agility show. We’d take them to some park or river, let them all out of the car off-lead, and they’d all hoon around chasing each other and having a merry old time while we paced up and down. In the last 2 minutes before we went to put them back in the car, they’d finally get around to unloading themselves.
Why did they do this? They’d been trained to. The purpose of the walk was to get them to poo, so we had a tendency to end the walk once they’d all pooed. They learned that it was better to hold it in so they could have a longer walk. When we were running late and decided to try to get them back into the car, they’d get down to business because they knew playtime was over and they might not get another chance to go for a while.
I’m trying to avoid Able learning this pattern by adopting “Poos Before Playtime” as my golden rule. This means that when we first go outside for him to toilet, I have him on a lead. I don’t let him get sidetracked by bouncing on flax bushes or doing zoomies round the yard – we are there to do poos. Once this is done, I take the lead off, and if I have time I spend five minutes outside in the garden with him, playing with him and letting him explore.
I’m sure this will seem excessively controlling to some people, but I’m hoping I will reap the reward of a dog who doesn’t need to be walked up and down for half an hour before he toilets!
Midnight Mischief Management
This is not really agility-specific, but it’s a common problem that isn’t discussed much – the dog that wakes its owner up in the middle of the night, every night, so that it can go out. Of course sometimes the dog may be physically unable to hold on all night, but I suspect often it is just an excuse for some fun time outside.
The solution to this is an amendment to the “Poos Before Playtime” rule – the Playtime part only happens during the day. If your puppy wakes you up in the middle of the night to go toilet, of course you’ll take him out (imagine if you were stuck in a room with no toilet and needed to go!), but you’ll take him outside on a lead, give him a short period of time to do his thing, and then pop him straight back into his crate. Playtime can wait until morning.
Rik developed a very annoying habit of needing to toilet between midnight and 1am after I’d had her about a year. The toilet breaks gradually got longer and longer as she investigated the garden, ignoring me as I hissed at her from the doorway that it was time to hurry up and come come back inside before we all froze to death. Side note: I’d also always used quite a loud recall cue with her, and she would completely ignore me if I called her at a normal volume.
And then there was the night when Rik found a cat in the back yard, chased it through the hedge into the neighbours’, went through his bins, got out onto the street, and started raiding all the other bins that were lined up for rubbish day as well. I had to put shoes on and go outside in my nightie and hunt down my horrible dog, and eventually had to give up and yell loudly enough to wake the whole street up. She came prancing back from the cul-de-sac across the street, very pleased with her evening adventure.
This was my snapping point, and I decided that it was time to do something about it. In Rik’s case she can often hold on for 12+ hours if it happens to be raining outside, so I was fairly confident she didn’t actually need to pee in the middle of the night. I devised a plan.
The next night when Rik woke me up at 1am, I put my shoes on, put a lead on her, and we went outside together. I waited for 90 seconds, she didn’t pee, and we went back inside.
Rik was very confused. This wasn’t how her night was supposed to go.
Fifteen minutes later Rik insisted she needed to pee again. I put my shoes on, put a lead on her, and we went outside together. She stood there staring at me for 90 seconds, and we went back inside.
We repeated this performance at 2am. And 3am. And 4am. And the next night at 12:30am.
And then never again. It took two nights to break a habit that had been annoying me for a couple of years. In the last three years she’s only woken me up once or twice per year. Every time without fail, she’s unleashed a stream of ghastly-smelling diarrhoea the second she’s out the door. I am very happy to let her out for that, and even happier that I now get to sleep through the night!