# Boston Terrier housebreaking, frustrated!



## squishmike (Sep 15, 2012)

Hello,

Our Boston Terrier is 5 months old and we've been working at house breaking him for nearly 2 months now with very little improvement. We do all the regular things, take him out frequently, praise him and give him treats when he goes outside etc. but he just doesn't seem to get it that peeing inside is bad!

We've tried both methods to get him to stop going inside.. for the first month we never scolded him or got angry at him for going inside, instead we just cleaned it up and took him out and did the whole praising thing when he went outside. After a while of no success we instead turned to rubbing his nose in his pee and putting him in time-out (bathroom with door closed for 10-20 min).

Neither has seemed to work. He still pees randomly right in front of us! He'll literally have just come in from going outside, hang out for 20 minutes with us, then get up and pee on the carpet. He knows he's been bad when he does it as we loudly clap to interrupt him. He puts his ears down and hides.

We're cleaning up pee in the house sometimes 3-4 times a day. Our carpet is getting ruined for sure.

We leave him the run of the kitchen and living room while at work... I come home around noon every day to take him out... sometimes he'll hold it sometimes i'll come home to a fresh pool of pee to cleanup.

We don't like the idea of puppy pads as we think it will train him to go inside. We crated him for the first few weeks but decided to give him the run of the living room/kitchen while we're not home for extended periods (my gf doesn't like sticking him in a crate for hours on end).

What do we do? Just keep at it? How long does it take...  is there something we're not doing??


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## aiw (Jun 16, 2012)

> We've tried both methods to get him to stop going inside.. for the first month we never scolded him or got angry at him for going inside, instead we just cleaned it up and took him out and did the whole praising thing when he went outside. After a while of no success we instead turned to rubbing his nose in his pee and putting him in time-out (bathroom with door closed for 10-20 min).


You're right on track to create a dog who is afraid to pee in front of you. That will complicate your life HUGELY. Housetraining is all about supervision and preventing accidents, if he is afraid to go in front of you instead of alerting you when he needs to pee he will try to sneak away and pee somewhere out of the way in your house. You will be working against each other, he will be trying to sneak away and refusing to pee in front of you when outside while you're trying to supervise him inside and watch for him peeing outdoors. What he is learning from you is not 'don't pee inside' its 'pee makes them SO MAD, never pee in front of them anywhere'. He will associate the correction with the action and not the location. The best advice I can give is STOP CORRECTING HIM. Seriously, it made my dog 100 times harder to housetrain.

Crate him while you're away. He doesn't know yet not to go inside and every time he is given the opportunity to (because you can't supervise) you reinforce the idea that peeing inside is okay. I also leashed my dog while inside at first, that way he couldn't sneak off to pee and he was always within sight and grabbing distance. Make sure you supervise outside and give a treat and great praise every time he goes out there, make it a place he will _want_ and ask to go. The key to training is supervision, which is your responsibility. Every time he has an accident _you_ should rub your nose in it because its your fault for not watching him properly, he is a puppy and doesn't know any better. Would you do something like that to a toddler? If he starts to pee or you see the signs he will (sniffing, circling) interrupt by clapping you hands and scoop him and carry him outside. If he has already gone and you didn't notice, the fault is yours.

I know its frustrating... I just finished housetraining my new rescue dog after almost 6 months (took so long because of his fear of peeing in front of me). Make a commitment to complete 100% supervision for a month, its a pain but doing it properly for a month and ending up with a housetrained dog is WAY better than mostly doing it for a year. Good luck!


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## georgiapeach (Mar 17, 2012)

You're giving him WAY too much freedom he doesn't deserve yet. He needs to be crated until he's housetrained. I also had a BT that was a nightmare to housetrain. I found out later that it's not unusual for the breed, so hang in there! He needs to go out often - small dogs have tiny bladders, and many don't completely potty train until a year or so. Make sure he goes out after eating, drinking, playing, waking up (and pronto, at that!), etc. He needs to go back to potty training 101 right now.

Don't rub his nose in it. He'll just learn to hide and pee/poo in a room where you can't seem him go. Close off all rooms of your house where you can't directly supervise the puppy (bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.). If he's out of your sight, he's up to something, trust me! If you catch him going, make an "acht, acht," sound (or a loud hissing sound - anything that gets his attention), pick him up, and quickly take him outside, and liberally praise/treat (have really good treats - like cheese or tiny bits of hotdog) when he pees/poos outside. He needs to learn that good things happen when he goes outside. As you've found out, the negative nose rubbing doesn't work at all. 

If you can't take him outside enough during the day when you're working (once at lunch is not often enough at the stage he's at right now), put down newspaper on one end of his crate or in an x-pen set up in the kitchen (or some other area with no carpet), so he'll have somewhere to go without having to sit in it. If a dog has to sit in his own mess, he loses the instinct to keep himself clean and will be nearly impossible to housebreak. It's very distressing for a dog to have to do this, as well. You definitely don't want that to happen! At night, take up his water around 2 hours before bedtime. 

Make sure any inside messes are cleaned with an enzyme cleaner, such as Nature's Miracle. You may not be able to smell it, but your puppy sure will. He'll continue to return to the scene of the crime if he can smell former messes. This includes any messes in his crate or x-pen. Blot urine accidents with paper towels (don't rub), then apply the enzyme cleaner liberally (it needs to get down to the root of the stain (to the subfloor, if necessary). Let sit for several minutes, then blot again with paper towels.


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## Hambonez (Mar 17, 2012)

I agree that the accidents are your fault, not his. He is not being supervised close enough when he's free (and he has WAY too much freedom!). Close enough is arm's reach away so as soon you see him getting ready to go, you can grab him and run outside. It took us some practice to learn what that looked like because we have a dachshund mix - REALLY hard to see he's squatting!! What do you think rubbing his nose in pee is going to do? If I was a dog it would make me afraid of someone coming towards me because they're going to do something mean. He doesn't know he's been bad, you're startling him, and he's reacting to that. If he's going 20 minutes after you bring him out, then he needs to go out every 20 minutes. I KNOW it's frustrating and it sucks and you don't want to be going out that much - we got our puppy last February, and it was cold and wet and we were out there every.20.minutes. when the dog wasn't confined/sleeping. There were days when all I wanted to do was cry because I was basically tethered to the puppy and could do nothing else - but the reward was a dog who was housebroken around 5 months old. He's 11 months old now and goes out about every 4 hrs during the day (can go 10 hrs overnight no problem - HE refuses to get out of bed, we don't make him wait that long), and in between he will ring a bell if he needs to go. Granted not all dogs will be ready to be housebroken so early, but even when he wasn't, we were averaging 1-2 accidents a WEEK, and all our faults. Close, constant, supervision is key! 

With regards to feeling bad about the crate -- my dog is sometimes crated, sometimes left out in the living room, and either way all he does is go to sleep as far as we can tell. His toys don't move if he's out. If we give him a stuffed kong or treat he'll have that, then he jumps in a chair and goes to sleep until we get home (as evidenced by yawning and stretching when we get home). Nothing to feel bad about.


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## squishmike (Sep 15, 2012)

I agree we've given him too much freedom, and I've brought it up with the GF and she really doesn't want to confine him again (I'm all for it honestly, I guess she's just a sucker!). We don't actually rub his nose in it it's more of a 'show him this is what we're mad about' thing. We didn't do this at first but I guess we regressed to it after so many pees on the carpet.

How will he be about going back being confined again, though? He hasn't really used his crate for over a month now... he sleeps in his dog bed on top of a snuggy instead. And we never used to close his crate either, he just slept in there on his own, so putting him in there and closing it... I don't know if that's a good idea.

What about putting him in one of our bathrooms with his bed during the day with closed door? He doesn't seem to want to pee on tile so he would probably hold it the 4 hours or so before I can get home at lunch time. Problem now is he's used to having the freedom of the living room during the day.


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## hamandeggs (Aug 11, 2011)

Don't just throw him into being crated - but if you crate train him again and make the crate his fun den, he'll be OK. If you google "crate games," you'll see how to do this. 

The bathroom would be an OK alternative if he doesn't mind it. He might just pee on his bed though. 

Honestly, most dogs don't mind being crated, especially if the crate has been introduced properly. They just sleep. Especially with a puppy, where there are so many problems with giving the dog free run (slows down potty training, your house is messed up, risk of chewing things up), giving the dog free run is almost more for the owner than for the dog, you know? In the long run, crate training helps so much with potty training (by avoiding accidents) that it's better for the dog.

"Show him what you're mad about" is pointless and likely to do more harm than good. Unless you literally catch him in the act, he can't make the connection, that's the simple fact. You're just going to make him scared of you. You need to watch him LIKE A HAWK when you're home - prevent him from having the accident in the first place - and confine him when you can't watch him. The goal is accident prevention. Also, just to reiterate, make sure you're cleaning up with Nature's Miracle (or another enzyme cleaner) and following the instructions on the bottle exactly. That's really important.


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