Chapter 4 - Training Your Dog To Be Home Alone

For those who missed the first two installments, Dakota is a shelter dog, twice abandoned by owners who never took the time to train her, allowing her to become a wild child until they could not handle her any more. She's an Australian Cattle Dog mix which added a few quirks to her training. In Part I - Training an Adult Problem Dog, we took you through her first months of training with us. Part II - Potty Training an Adult Dog gives a very detailed account of how we broke her of her severe indoor peeing habit.

Dakota came to us as an outdoor dog. She did not appear to know what indoors meant. It took her awhile to catch on to the concept that you could look out a window. Everything in the house was new and foreign to her. She came with a lot of mental baggage and a very bad nervous pee habit.

In the beginning was total chaos. Three days after adopting Dakota we had to go to work... She wasn't ready to be left loose in the house, we didn't have a room in the house to confine her that we trusted her in, and we hadn't gotten a crate for her never having used one before. That left the garage. We confined her to a portion of the garage and off we went for the day. We anticipated that she'd potty in the garage so we put down some paper in case she'd been paper trained previously, and we left her with food and water.

Bear, my husband, got home first. Nothing could have prepared him for what he walked into. Dakota had pooped everywhere. Not only had she pooped, she had managed to smear it all over her, the floor, her food bowl, her water feeder, and the toys we'd left for her. Welcome Home!

Subsequent days he came home to find that she'd chewed her bowls into teeny little pieces and had ripped open a bag of cement, scattering it's contents hither and yon. Dakota did not do well left alone in the garage. Several months later we went off on a vacation. We bought a 6x10 chain link kennel and put it in the garage. We put a huge watering feeder in it and her food bowl, laid a thick carpet of hay down for her and hired the girl next door to feed her twice a day and check on her.

Dakota fared better than she had when we boarded her at the kennel but she totally destroyed her food bowl and the brand new jumbo watering feeder. When left alone in the garage, Dakota was destructive. We never left her alone in the house to give her the same opportunity.

I'm not a big fan of locking a dog in a box. Gypsy Rose has full run of the house and she's a dreamboat but Dakota was far from ready for this. About a month after adopting Dakota we got her a crate. I don't know why they call it a crate, it looks like a cage to me. Dakota was moved into the house on our work days and put into the crate. We absolutely did not trust her not to attempt to break out of jail so we reinforced the crate with metal clips any place we thought she could pry it apart and we clipped the door latches. Dakota loose in the house would have been disastrous.

This was a godsend. She did not potty in the crate. Amazingly enough, she held it! And her crate was huge, much bigger than Dakota. She could stand up, sit up, lay down and stretch out without being cramped. We attempted to put a blanket in there for her but she chewed a two foot hole in it the first day so we took it out and she didn't get another one.

We did not attempt to put food or water bowls in the crate. We already knew how they would fare. We fed and watered her before we left and again when we got home. That was just going to have to be good enough.

During the months of potty training we did not leave her unsupervised anywhere, at any time, in the house. I made her follow me everywhere. I'd hook my finger under her collar and guide her around the house with me. I took her into the bathroom when I needed to potty and closed the door so she couldn't leave. I locked her in the bathroom with me when I took a shower and frequently peeked out of the shower curtain to make sure she was not going potty or getting into anything. I watched her like a hawk.

I wanted to be able to catch her BEFORE she let loose in the house so I could scurry her out to the potty spot. And I wanted to catch her BEFORE she got into anything or chewed on anything. The logic was that she did not have any established indoor bad habits except for pottying and I wanted to guide her to the right habits. I didn't want her to do it wrong and discover it was fun or do it wrong and be chastised which caused her to pee during those early months. The goal was to nip it in the bud so the bud would never bloom. I did not want her to learn that certain flowers even existed.

Dakota was in her curious stage, exploring the world around her having no idea what was okay to play with. Some of the things she grabbed were: an empty plastic milk jug, shoes, a wooden billy club, tin foil with meat drippings she snatched out of the garbage can, berries off of potted plants, and rolls of toilet tissue sitting on the floor. We didn't catch her in time with the toilet tissue and she shredded it.

With everything else we caught her in time, immediately taking the object away making it clear that this object was illegal and replacing it with something she was allowed to have. If I took something away, I gave her a dog chew or a dog toy to replace it. She learned which items belonged to her. We went through a lot of dog chew toys during that first year and the strategy paid off. Dakota just celebrated one year with us which puts her at 19 months old. Not once has she destroyed an object in the house by chewing (though the garage was a different story). This was amazing progress for a dog who initially wanted to grab everything small that came into her sphere.

We did not attempt to train Dakota to stay home alone until first we were confident that she could, and would, hold her pee, and that we could reasonably trust her not to destroy things. This phase of her dog training was very gradual. Dakota had come to us godawful so it was going to take a lot for us to trust her with this very big step.

The first goal was to trust her alone out of sight. Initially if she disappared around the corner or through a doorway I was hot on her tail. If she attempted to leave the room I'd call her back or follow her if she went out of sight. Once she stopped grabbing things illegally while in our sight she graduated to the next level. We let her disappear out of sight for a few very brief minutes before following to check up on her. Baby steps, we took her dog training by very small baby steps. When she could be left for three to four minutes out of sight without incident we'd let it go longer. Over the course of many months we began to trust her alone in other rooms as long as she was on the same floor we were on. We used a baby gate to block the stairway.

This is the first step in training a dog to be home alone left loose in the house. First you must trust them out of your sight when you are at home.

Once you have achieved that goal you can start the next phase: leaving them in the house alone when you are outside. Initially this also was just a few moments, allowing her loose in the house when I'd go out to get the mail or take the garbage out. That quickly a dog can get into mischief so we took very small steps. The first time a neighbor stopped me to chit chat took Dakota to the next level of up to 20 minutes alone in the house. She spent those minutes watching me out the window. I could see her face in the window so I did not worry overmuch.

As the weeks pass take every small opportunity to leave your dog alone inside: taking out the mail, talking to a neighbor in the driveway, mowing the lawn, trimming your roses, any activity that puts you outside for very short periods of time. When you reach that golden place where she can be left indoors while you are outdoors, you can start weaning her from her crate when you go away.

Another goal we set out to achieve before leaving her alone in the house while we were away was to leave her alone in the bedroom with the door closed. Once she was sleeping through the night loose in our bedroom without incident we began to put her in there sometimes during the day when we were home, for very brief periods, with the door closed. Make sure to potty the dog first so that they are empty. It's better to prevent an accident than clean one up later. It is better for them to learn the right habits than break a bad habit later.

Again this progressed with baby steps. Five minutes, then ten, twenty, up to forty five minutes locked in the bedroom alone. Our bedroom was for sleeping, we never played with her in there so she associated this room with sleep, or laying down quietly while waiting for us to get up in the morning. We removed several things from the bedroom that we thought might tempt her before moving into this phase of training. There was a phone sitting on the floor we thought might be tempting to chew on and we unplugged several exposed electrical cords just in case. Everything small on the floor was put up somewhere. We did not leave any temptations for her.

Once we knew we could trust her for an hour, we upped it to two. Little by little we left her in the bedroom for longer and longer periods, always pottying her right before we left and again IMMEDIATELY when we got home, and then rewarding her with a good treat. Our own personal potty could wait, putting up groceries could wait, everything could wait for us to take her out to pee because she was in a highly excited state. We'd take her out as fast as we could get her out the door, afterward giving her a really good treat and a lot of praise, then finally all of us settling down to our normal routines.

One year ago I could not have imagined leaving her alone in the house for even one single minute. Last weekend she spent six hours alone in the bedroom while we were out and she aced it. I am very proud of the progress she has made from being the most godawful dog to this incredible dog that I am learning to trust. We're not ready to give her run of the house alone yet if we're away though she does have run of the house if we're outside.

Dakota is in training to be the Perfect Dog. She started out godawful and has made amazing progress on her journey. We are very proud of her.

Chapter 1 - Training Our Problem Dog
Chapter 2 - Potty Training An Adult Dog
Chapter 3 - Dealing With Dog Chewing Problems
Chapter 4 - Training Your Dog To Be Home Alone
Chapter 5 - Proof That Any Dog Can Be Trained
Chapter 6 - Interviewed for Victoria Stilwell
Chapter 7 - Motivating Your Dog To Honor And Obey You

Happy Doggies T-shirts

T-shirts and gifts for dog lovers. Dakota isn't on a shirt yet but give me time... :-)

Village T-shirts

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Mac and Windows Shareware Games

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