More wee problems

At the time of writing this we have had Henry for about 9 months and I am trying to catch up with his story before writing the day to day antics of his life with us. I have decided that I'll come up to date with the wee problems though as in my desperation I have scoured every internet site, brain and book with possible solutions so just in case there is some-one out there with the same problem here is my solution of sorts.

Henry had had a bad start to life and had never been house-trained. He'd never lived in a house before and I think that limited his need to communicate with humans as probably the only contact he got was some food thrown at him every now and then. This meant he didn't really know how to communicate with us and he didn't know when we were trying to communicate with him and no matter how basic we do need to communicate with each other for him to realise that we don't want him to wee and poo in the house.

Henry had also been through a really bad time and going from that to living in a cosy warm cottage with us where we would feed him, love him and give him everything he needed seemed perfect to us but Henry's previous home and life had been nothing like that and he was having to go through a massive learning curve to adjust to his new life. Being young and somewhat mad he is also sometimes easily distracted and so letting him out for a wee is great but if a sheep walks past or the farm dogs bark he instantly forgets why he was outside and goes to investigate. If we weren't giving him 100% attention he would just wander back into the house and wee there.

So. I had a big think about all of this. Henry needed a strict routine, very strict, with no deviation whatsoever. I decided to work out a sort of daily timetable to which I would have to adhere if we were going to be successful.

Every morning I would wake and get up to let Henry out before he had had a chance to wee or poo in the house. For Henry this meant I had to get up at 4.30!!! But if it was going to work then I 'd do it. So up I got, bleary eyed and half asleep and sent him out for a wee. Amazingy he got the idea. When I came down he would still be on his bed and he had wee'd outside before he'd even thought about doing it in the living room.

Gradually I moved the time to 6.00am. this has taken many weeks. I moved the alarm 5 minutes on once every week or so. I figured that if I did it slowly Henry woudn't notice and his bladder wouldn't either as technically I suppose we were training his bladder and bowels more than his brain.

If I got impatient and moved the alarm to far or too often Henry would catch me out and have an accident and we'd have to go back a week or so.

I also changed Henrys breakfast time. I used to feed him and Molly as soon as I got up so they were associating my coming downstairs with food. I now feed them after I've eaten and no earlier than 8.30am, this has calmed the mornings down immensley and I'm wondering if Henry's stomach was waking him which in turn woke his bladder!

During the day Henry is let ouside at 8.30 after his breakfast, 10.30 for a mid morning pee, he goes for a walk around 1pm and is then let out at 4.30 after his dinner, again at 7.30pm and finally 10.30pm.

He has learned to pace if he wants to go out in between times, I think he has learned this from Molly. And he has also learned the phrase "do you want to go outside" to which he puts his ears up and kind of smiles if he needs to go to the loo.

If I stick to this routine he has absolutely no accidents. I can't relax the routine as he will then relapse but it's working really well so far and I think given time he will settle down and have no more accidents.

The only problem we are having is if I go out or we have a change to the routine of the house such as visitors, Other Half working from home, or if the dogs go into kennels when we go away. These type of things usually result in a relapse for either just one incident or could last a couple of days. But just keeping the routine going will get him back to normal very quickly.

Out of all of the distractions the hardest one right now is if we go out and leave the dogs in the house alone. We could be gone for five minutes or five hours and sometimes Henry will wee and sometimes he won't, but more than likely he will have wee'd. I think this is something that will take some time to get sorted and is probably not helped by the fact that I am around all the time usually and he is not used to being left alone. Overall we are getting there but it has been a long and unexpectedly hard slog, something I wasn't expecting to last quite so long but I'm sure eventually I will be able to completely relax and not worry about finding a wet patch on the carpet with my socks on!

Oh and the brilliant carpet wee and poo cleaner I got from the vets is an absolute godsend, it's called Total Care and costs about £5.