POOPED on MY BED!!! otherwise well paper-trained Sheltie

[Urumqidog]

Our 15 mo old sheltie (neutered male) has been successfully paper trained for a year. We live in an urban hi-rise (in China) where there was no place to take him out to poop, so we paper trained him to go on one newspaper on top of a piece of vinyl. Has worked very well for a year.

BUT Just this week he climbed up on our bed in the evening and POOPED a big !@#$% pile right in the middle of our bed. I can't figure out what goin' on in that little doggie brain. Nothing new going on in his life, No new pets, we were home at the time...

He has a cat as a playmate that he likes, we and our kids are home most of the day and night so he gets plenty of attention. He has done this 3-4 times in the last week, all when we were home. His potty paper where he does both pee and poop 99.99% of the time was not dirty each time. I even made a point this week to encourage him every time I saw him going in the right place. My wife noticed that one of the times he was out of water (probably for a couple of hours at most). We NEVER allow him up on the beds or furniture, and it is very rare (only once in a while if he and the cat are having an especially wild time) that he gets up on the sofa. Our bedroom (with the bed he pooped on) is where he sleeps at night on the floor.

Each time he pooped on the bed I scolded him and locked him in the bathroom for half an hour.

What should we do? we washed and bleached the spot on the comforter. This is driving us nuts. HELP!!

[Giselle]

Welcome to the boards!

It's not a very good idea to lock your dog in the bathroom as punishment. Dogs don't reason like we do. They don't know what's right or wrong according to our standards. Your dog won't understand that his pooping caused you to lock him in the bathroom and so, therefore, pooping must be bad. He just won't make that complex connection, so I would stop locking him in the bathroom.

First, my advice to housetraining lapses is always to check out your dog medically and make sure he's physically sound. Make sure he doesn't have a UTI or GI problems.

Next, since you say there hasn't been any dramatic changes in life, has there been any changes at all with the placement of the newspaper?

If that's not the case, I would simply start back at Square 1. A lot of dogs like to eliminate on soft surfaces, so that could explain why yours chose to go on your bed (it's actually pretty common :p ). For now, treat him like a puppy and restrict his access to the bedroom. Take him to his newspaper every few hours and supervise him constantly or crate/confine him. Hopefully, you'll only have to re-train him once!

[elizabethann]

Fenway pooped on my bed once. It was disgusting...went through to the mattress. Yuck!

Come to find out, he was just not feeling good. Your dog might be sick. It might be a good idea to bring him to the vet for a check-up, just to make sure he doesn't have a bug or something.

I didn't punish Fenway because I felt bad for him. I'm sure your dog didn't mean to poop on your bed. Please don't punish him. It's not easy being a puppy sometimes.

Good luck.

[pitc9]

I agree 100% with NOT punishing him by locking him in the bathroom.
If you don't catch the dog in the act and correct him at that time, correction at a later time (locking him in the bathroom) does nothing.
Otherwise he has no idea why he's being punished.

Something you might want to think about would be litter box training your dog. Here's a site to look at:
http://www.kturby.com/litter/litter.htm