Need some help with housebreaking

Ok, here's the background: brought our puppy home 4 weeks ago (11 weeks then, 15 weeks now) with coccidia from the breeder and the terrible habit of eating her feces. We've been treating her for the coccidia and trying pills called "Nasty Habit" for the poop eating. We've finally stabilized her belly, hardly any more diarreah, but this puppy is just not getting the housebreaking concept. When we go outside, she understands that's a good place to relieve herself. But at night, she continues to poop in her crate. She can't last the whole night, so we get up to take her out. But sometimes she goes and then we've got poop crate to clean up at 4 a.m. (like we did this morning, again). And during the day, she can't stay in a crate only, because she's completely soiled when we get home. So she gets a larger, penned in area with a training pad, which she uses, but we'd much rather work on keeping her in a crate and having her start to build that training.

So, with all this said, who has some good ideas? Some friends have said to feed her in her crate, that that should stop the pooping in the crate, other friends suggested giving her a treat when she goes outside and stricter discipline when she goes inside....HELP!!! Our other corgi was a dream at housebreaking and this is been a pretty tough adjustment period.

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Permalink Reply by GoGoRainbow on February 18, 2009 at 11:59am

All of the advice so far has been good but I'd like to add a tactic we're using. We have hung a cowbell (it could be any bell) from the door handle and we force her to ring it before we go out everytime (initially we had to just pick her up and push her head against it to ring it, with lots of praise).

Now she has slowly learned that when she wants to go out, she can ring the bell. We can hear it from across the house and its great. Sometimes though, she'll do it just to get us to come cuz she wants attention, but I just make her go outside even if that's not what she wanted.

It gets a little annoying because sometimes you don't want to let her outside, but if she does it a second or third time, hitting it harder (louder) each time, I know she probably actually has to go.

One last aspect is that you should try to use the same door for the potty training all the time, consistency is good. My husband started using the back door recently and though she hadn't had an accident in weeks, she had 3 yesterday as she was probably waiting by the backdoor where there is no bell.

Good luck! I'm sorry the crate training isn't working and your pup hasn't learned that she can hold it yet. (ours is 19 weeks old).