everytime I take our 8 week pup outside to toilet, she chews stones and tries to swallow them, so I end up ending the toilet trip short and she then pees in the pen. Is is ok to hold her by the collar and keep her head off the ground or will this mean she won't relax to pee?
She needs to be outside, playing and so on. You can't hold her head up all the time! Most puppies put absolutely everything in their mouths. The more you fuss about this, the worse it gets. You can actually encourage the puppy to put stuff where you can't steal it (in their tummies) if you keep taking stuff. Just either ignore her or encourage her towards you and drop treats (try not to let her see you drop the treats) and hopefully she will soon learn dropping stuff and your feet is a really cool thing to do.
Bailey did that too - we used the exchange system - treat for whatever we didn't want in his mouth. Worked a treat until the other day when he dropped a flipping big stone on my toe (I was outside in the garden with no shoes on - my bad!) and sat there waiting for his treat while I was hopping around using words not suitable for a 14 month old to hear!
My puppy is now 20 weeks and she has done this from the day we got her. She is now house trained and we always go to the garden with her lead on for toiletting. She just accepts it. Playing in the garden is another thing and I have to pluck up courage to take her out. I try really hard not to get in a tizz about the stones, leaves, soil, anything else she can get in her mouth and offer an exchange for a treat, saying 'leave it' - it is slowly beginning to work but still a 'work in progress' .
Success! I let her go to the potty area and dropped 3 pieces of kibble near my feet and hey presto she did a wee! (Without eating the stones!). Thank you, I am so pleased!
Great - I do the same when they are little (dropping treats), then when they are older I teach 'leave it' and 'drop it'.
It's not good to start training an 8 week old puppy (or indeed any puppy or dog) when it has stones and sticks in its mouth. Leave it, give, drop need to be trained in planned exercises and then proofed before they are at all effective - otherwise you are just waving treats around while the puppy does something you don't want it to do. Which is pretty hopeless really. So the tiny puppy and stones thing is just about effective management. If you can get a puppy spitting stuff out by your feet then that's a great start but it's WAY off any kind of behaviour you should be asssociating with any cue.
I thought for sure Duggan had 15kg of stones in his gut. I was convinced it's why he gained so much weight and I was surprised he survived the first 11 months. His regularly cleaned and replenished water bowl consistently turned up stones. As we speak I can hear the crunches of him clearing minute, almost invisible specks of crushed rock from the driveway off his tongue. The less I cared the less he ate. He's still alive and we're better friends for it. Sometimes I think he finds the smallest peice of dirt on the floor just to get a reaction out of me. Like the puppy handbook says about the extinction of behaviours, we have had many victories from non reaction. Just keep your insurance up to date for the first year at least.
I'm giving her pieces of kibble whilst waiting for her to relax and wee / poo (to keep stones out her mouth), but then she doesn't appreciate a piece of kibble as a reward for actually doing the wee/ poo as she has already eaten 10-20 pieces! All the puppy treats seem to be 3 months old or over, and our puppy is only 9 weeks. How can I get her incentivised? I'm feeling a bit low, she did a wee in the play pen, I took her straight outside and she did a second wee within five minutes outside, then back indoors and she did another wee five minutes later, I cleared it up and then another wee five minutes later. I'm keeping calm with her, but she doesn't seem to think of outside as a preferred place to wee. She is stuck in the play pen as she is not reliable to come out of it even once she has done her business outside. Any ideas on treats?
Your pup eating indigestible material -sticks, stones, mulch- can be a serious and expensive problem. Whether aversive or positive technique you need to nip it or your dog might be on the table having surgery.
