How to Stop Your Dog From Peeing Indoors

Hey, guys, My name is Dr. Lehrer here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital today. The main reason for the video today is to talk about how to get your dog from urinating inside your house. So there is a common misconception that if you have a male dog that is intact, meaning he has his testicles and he is urinating or marking in your house, then as soon as you neuter him, that will go ahead and eliminate the behavior. That is a farce. It will reduce the chances of him actually wanting to urinate in the house, potentially because you are removing the testosterone, which usually drives the need and the desire to go ahead and mark territories. Now, the issue is, if you have a dog, a male dog that has started urinating in the house, and it's been going on for a long time, like a year or more now you run into the issue that there's a possibility that this can become a habit or a behavior, a learned behavior. And so if you go ahead and neuter them after a prolonged period of time, then the chances of the physically altering your pet, changing that behavior starts to go down. Now, one of the other things about getting your dog to stop urinating in the house, which is something that I've had to deal with in the past, is you have to be realistic. If you're drinking water on a regular basis and drinking the normal amounts of water, think about how many times you actually go to the bathroom, and then think about how often you take your dog out. If your dog is actually urinating in the house and you're only taking them out twice a day or three times a day, it's probably not fair to expect that they're going to hold it the whole time, because otherwise they're probably going to look something like this. Trying to keep the pee in. It's pretty uncomfortable. And if you haven't tried it before, hold your pee for as long as possible and make sure that you're drinking plenty of water. That's pretty uncomfortable. So you'll want to go ahead and you'll want to set them up for success. Sometimes what you can do is you can control the amount of water that you're giving them, or you can control the times that you're giving them the water. So that way you know more or less when they're going to urinate. The other thing is identifying the spots that they typically like to go ahead and urinate. My dogs, they like to urinate on the fireplace, which is good because it allows me to know exactly where I need to check for urine and Also, when they're hanging out with my wife and my family and us on the couch and we're watching TV and I see somebody running over to the fireplace, I call their attention and I go ahead and I take them outside. And when I take them outside, I make a big deal about going ahead and actually urinating outside. That means giving them love and attention, getting them all riled up, giving them a special toy and or giving them a special treat that they only get when they urinate outside. Okay, the last thing that you want to make sure is if your dog is urinating inside the house. You want to make sure that there are no physiologic or physical problems with your dog. So you want to go ahead and you want to try and rule out something like a urinary tract infection. You want to rule out any sort of bladder stones. You want to rule out any sort of stress induced cystitis. Now what Rocky is doing here is he is licking the catheter a little bit. We just want to make sure it's really important that they do not mess with that catheter. So you'll notice if you see your dog at the hospital or pictures of your dog at the hospital with the IV catheter on, they will normally have this collar on. It's to protect them so that we don't have to put another catheter in and to reduce infections. If you guys found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share. Thanks for watching. Have a great day.