We have a 10 week old English Lab pup. He eats at about 7am, 12:30pm and 5pm. No water after about 7:30pm. He used to poop after meals and on walks. However now he doesn’t poop much in the daytime. Maybe once or twice. Now he’s pooping more at night in his crate. I know he doesn’t like it. It gets it on him as his crate is small. He never pees in the house or crate. He can hold it. We wait for him to tell us he needs to poop, but he doesn’t. Yesterday he pooped twice during the day and 3x (!) in his crate. Exhausting to say yes the least for everyone, including him. Help!
Hi there, unfortunately this is a serious problem, and can be hard to cure, so you need to act quickly. Once a puppy has soiled its bed a few times, the instinct for keeping the bed clean may be lost. Puppies also like to poop where they have pooped before. So what I would do is put the crate away for now. Get a playpen for your puppy to sleep in put a new bed in one corner of the playpen, and cover the floor area in puppy pads. That gives your puppy a chance to relearn clean habits, and hopefully, at just ten weeks old, forget the habit of pooping in bed. You may be able to return to crate training later. The reason puppies poop in their crates in the first place is because they were crated for too long, and you might find this thread helpful for information on crates and crating times. An alternative to the above, is to put the puppy in a brand new crate (with new bedding) next to your bed, so that you can hear when the puppy needs to go out at night.
