I am helping to take care of my son's black lab puppy, Sadie while he is at work. She is 17 weeks old today and has been coming to my house during the day since she was 9 weeks old. I also have a 4yo male lab (he is the 4th lab we have had) so I have the two of them during the day. Sadie is crate trained and does well at my son's house. (her house). She sleeps in a crate all night and does not pee inside while she is there during the evenings or weekends. She goes to the door and whines to go out for him. For some reason, when she is here, that is not the case. I rarely leave her completely unattended, and let her out often. But even though she pees every time, she will come back in and within 15 minutes sometimes, I find a puddle. She is on antibiotics for a bacterial infection (possibly UTI?) but she has been taking the medicine for a week now. I thought it might improve but it has not. I am so frustrated because she should not need to pee this much. And many times, she doesn't even go to the door first, she just lets it go where she happens to be. I've never had this problem with any of my labs in the past and I'm at my wits end about what to do about it. Any suggestions or advice????
Hi and welcome to the forum. Puppies need to be retrained everywhere they go, they can't generalise. For example, she is housetrained at her house, but if she hasn't gone through the same process with your house she won't know automatically. I had to do this with my girl when we went to my mums house as she didn't know where she should be going. You need to go back to basics with her by taking her out every 30 minutes and really praise and reward her everytime she goes outside. Do you use an enzyme cleaner? If you are cleaning her wee with normal cleaning spray, it often has ammonia in it which will just attract the pup to use that area again. Hope this helps a bit.
Is she settled in the house without your son? Not distressed at all looking for him? Just mention this as I was caught out with a 10 month(?) boarder who had been in the house with my daughter for a few days totally clean and dry. Until she went for a shower. He ran back and forth to the door and i distracted him for a bit with some training, went to wash my hands when he then cocked his leg and wee-ed on my leg/foot/floor then whilst i was cleaning up (with simple solution) he pooped in our sun room. Aaargh! Anyway, the other thing is it could be a uti but the antibiotic hasn't managed to clear it? Would be weeing in your sons house too though if it was that.
Thanks for the replies. I am trying the retraining and she is getting better at going to the door and getting my attention. It still seems like it's more often than it should be but I'll keep working at it. She seems pretty settled here without my son. She has finished the medication for the UTI, so hopefully that's over with now.
