Why is male dog peeing in the house all of a sudden
One really annoying
problem is when our dogs are peeing inside the house and there could be a
number of reasons for this.
The first point we want
to make is that it's very important to deal with this as soon as possible.
When this starts to happen, if it goes on for a long time, it's really hard to reverse
once it's well ingrained, you want to jump on it right away.
Basically, there's two
main categories as to what can be going on. There could be a behavioral reason
or a medical reason.
You have to start with
the medical reasons first, so what I'd really recommend is that you go to your
vet and you have what's called a urinalysis performed and a urine culture.
What that does is it
looks for an infection in the bladder among other things that may cause the dog
an irritation in its bladder and make it start peeing in the home.
The other thing is it's
good to run general blood work because there's a lot of conditions that dogs
can have that make them drink a lot more and pee a lot more.
If they have to pee a
lot more, they may start doing it inside. One other condition that they can get
that's very specific that you can see in your pet is they can start to have
what's called sphincter laxity which is a level of incontinence.
where the sphincter that
keeps the urine inside the bladder, it can become loose.
The way we see this in dogs
is wherever they sleep usually their bedding, they'll wake up wake up and walk away
from it and you'll actually see a wet area where you're in has leaked out.
You treat that certainly
differently and this is really common particularly in female dogs because
that's sphincter is sensitized by estrogen.
So, after they've been spayed,
they produce less estrogen and this is something we do see happen commonly
after spaying, sometimes weeks, months,
or years afterwards.
Other symptoms you might
see is something called Pollakiuria which is where they will pee very small
volumes all the time instead of one large pee.
The reason why this
happens is if the bladder is irritated you have to remember, bladders kind of
like a balloon.
And then the urethra is
just a little tube so in order to urinate you have to squeeze that balloon to
make the urine go through this urethra and you need to relax it.
So, if the bladder is
painful and you go to squeeze it, they're
going to spasm because it hurts and then the urine doesn't come out that well
and so what happens is they dribble just a little bit of urine at a time and then
they stop.
You ever see that type of symptom going on in
your dog it means the bladder is painful and that they may have a urinary tract
infection or some other disease related to the bladder and you're going to want
to see your veterinarian.
As far as getting the medical issues out of
the way once you've done that you know now it's behavioral and what's really
difficult is finding the source or reason of that behavior.
A lot of dogs will
urinate in various areas of the home when they're stressed so when there's
renovations or people are coming and going.
Probably one of the most
common things is when the dog loses that really close friend in the home like
that daughter that goes off to university, the dog could start peeing on the
bed of that daughter.
That's a common symptom
that we see from time to time and that very specifically can be behavioral.
So, you're going to want
to do a couple things about this, again you want to rule out the medical reasons, no matter how much you think
it's a behavioral issue want to rule those out.
You want to address it
by retraining them essentially. When they go outside and they eliminate
outside, you want to have a special treat by the back door,
maybe in a Ziploc bag, little treats that they only get when they urinate outside.
Once they urinate you
pop one of those treats in and you reward them for urinating outside. You want
to get them out as much as possible so you increase your odds of them urinating
outside rather than inside, this is called counter conditioning.
You're basically changing
the emotion of the dog so that it's happier when it urinates outside by giving
it that treat.
The one thing I'd really
refrain from is punishment, we try not to do this anymore in our training.
We do a lot of positive
reinforcement but punishment would be obviously yelling at the dog, throwing something near it
that would scare it when it urinates in the home.
These things may
terrorize your dog more and cause more stress we really want to avoid those things.
The last thing is, is
you want to look for the reason that might be the stressor causing your dog to
do this.
So, if there are
renovations or people coming and going, if there's something that you think is bothering
them, you want to try to eliminate it as best.
You can to increase your
odds that this behavior is going to get better and we really recommend in some
cases to find a trainer or behaviorist.
That could come by your
home to figure out why this might be happening.
It's very difficult to
find those reasons and an outsider who specializes in that could help you a lot?
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