I called it “pee pee feet” and I hated visiting my neighbor’s house for it. Their dog peed on the floor every time he got excited which was anytime people came to visit. The worst part was that it was a wooden floor so the dog pee created a big puddle. He danced in the puddle getting his feet sopping wet with dog pee just before jumping up on you. Their dog didn’t just jump on you once, he was up and down and all around making sure to cover you with dog pee from ankle to thigh.
This was long before I ever owned a dog and I didn’t realize there were things they could have done to prevent their dog from peeing in the house or jumping on people. First and foremost they should have put their dog up somewhere when people came to visit even if it was just a baby gate blocking him from their visitors. You should never subject your visitors to bad dog behavior.
Dakota was a bad dog when we adopted her. She jumped, she chewed, she bullied our other dog, she bothered people, she got in our face when we were eating and most of all she peed. Dakota had the problem of being a nervous pee-er. If she was stressed, she peed. If she was excited, she peed. If you raised your voice one iota, she peed. If she was mad at you, she peed. If the urge struck, she peed. While putting the leash on to take her out to pee, she peed — every time.
They have fancy names for the different reasons that dogs pee in the house such as stress pee, excited pee, and nervous pee but the cause is pretty much the same: the dog lacks self control. Dakota came to us as a semi-adult dog with a total lack of self control and it took a lot of hard work to fix her but we succeeded.
We even wrote a book about our experiences in training a problem dog in Bad Dog to Best Friend. The chapter on how to stop a dog from peeing in the house is 16 pages long. Today, Dakota routinely spends nine hours with total freedom of the house on our workdays and she doesn’t pee in the house, chew or destroy things, or get in the garbage. We trust her to be a good dog and that’s a pretty big leap considering her awful beginnings with us.
If you know someone with a bad dog, or even a good dog except that he pees in the house, Bad Dog to Best Friend is the perfect gift. It’s more than a dog training book, it’s the story of one dog’s amazing journey from being a dog that nobody wanted to being a cherished family member.
Too many dogs end up at the dog pound for dog problems and we’re hoping that Dakota’s story can teach people how to fix their dogs instead of abandoning them. Keep the bad dogs out of the dog pound. Instead, transform them into Man’s Best Friend as they were meant to be!
