Why is my dog soiling in the house?

Soiling in the home can occur for a variety of reasons. Many are unrelated to housetraining and should be treated as a behavioral problem.

First, rule out medical reasons, separation anxiety, submissive urination, and territorial marking. These are behavioral problems. Acme Canine can develop a behavioral modification program to correct such behaviors.

To correct a housetraining problem, it may be necessary to go back a few steps in the housetraining process to get the dog back on track. There are common misconceptions about the term “housebroken,” which are important to understand.

  1. A dog who occasionally soils in the home should not be considered housebroken. Dogs do not generalize well, and so most likely, you made errors during the housetraining process, or you did not complete it.
  2. Failures in housetraining are human mistakes, not dog errors.
  3. Dogs do not housetrain themselves. It will take a team effort to obtain a housebroken dog.

A dog who is considered “housebroken” has been accident-free for several months (or years). If the dog started having accidents in the home, then stress may be the cause. Stress is a common reason for a dog to regress. The most common stressors are changes in the household: divorce, marriage and combining of families, baby on the way, a child going away to school, work schedule changes, moving to a new home, rearranged furniture, or death of a family member or another pet.

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