Separation anxiety and dog potty
Hello, I just joined this community because I am the new proud co-parent of a one-year-old Lhasa Apso named Bear. We got him from his previous owners who needed to make room for a new (human) baby. I looked through the tags and couldn't find anything that quite answered my questions, so sorry if this duplicates old posts at all.
Bear is a wonderful little boy and is well housetrained, but we are having some issues with separation anxiety. They told us when we got him that he was perfectly fine with being alone at home for up to 9 hours a day, but when we tried to leave him for only an hour or two we came home to total destruction of our hanging blinds, plus some torn up carpet. (Thank goodness, he didn't go to the bathroom on the floor.) He was completely untrained beyond housetraining in his old house, and we are trying to make him less spoiled here. Also, in his old house there were two other dogs and lots of people, so chances are he was rarely alone, if ever. We are trying to crate train him because we can't leave the house at all otherwise. We are practicing spending more time apart from him when we are in the house together, as well as crating him with a stuffed kong while we're home. He starts whining less than five minutes after we put him in the crate, even if we are in the same room and simply out of sight. We are purposely ignoring the whining and aren't letting him out of the crate until he is calm and quiet. However, I'm afraid that he won't learn to associate the crate with anything good if we keep this up, and I know that's supposed to be the point of crate training. We just desperately need him to get used to the crate so we can actually leave the house sometimes. Any suggestions?
Also, he is very good about going to the bathroom in the grassy pet area in our apartment complex, but we want to teach him to use the doggy potty we set up in our back yard. It's just a little patch of sod, and it would make it much easier for our busy student schedules not to have to walk him first thing in the morning and last thing at night. However, when I take him outside to the little grassy area, he either tries to walk away (which I don't permit because I bring him out on a leash), or he just lies down on the grass and stares at me. Any suggestions on how to communicate to him that the patch of grass is the potty? I saw something in a previous post about urine-scented stakes. Do you recommend I get one of those?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Bear is a wonderful little boy and is well housetrained, but we are having some issues with separation anxiety. They told us when we got him that he was perfectly fine with being alone at home for up to 9 hours a day, but when we tried to leave him for only an hour or two we came home to total destruction of our hanging blinds, plus some torn up carpet. (Thank goodness, he didn't go to the bathroom on the floor.) He was completely untrained beyond housetraining in his old house, and we are trying to make him less spoiled here. Also, in his old house there were two other dogs and lots of people, so chances are he was rarely alone, if ever. We are trying to crate train him because we can't leave the house at all otherwise. We are practicing spending more time apart from him when we are in the house together, as well as crating him with a stuffed kong while we're home. He starts whining less than five minutes after we put him in the crate, even if we are in the same room and simply out of sight. We are purposely ignoring the whining and aren't letting him out of the crate until he is calm and quiet. However, I'm afraid that he won't learn to associate the crate with anything good if we keep this up, and I know that's supposed to be the point of crate training. We just desperately need him to get used to the crate so we can actually leave the house sometimes. Any suggestions?
Also, he is very good about going to the bathroom in the grassy pet area in our apartment complex, but we want to teach him to use the doggy potty we set up in our back yard. It's just a little patch of sod, and it would make it much easier for our busy student schedules not to have to walk him first thing in the morning and last thing at night. However, when I take him outside to the little grassy area, he either tries to walk away (which I don't permit because I bring him out on a leash), or he just lies down on the grass and stares at me. Any suggestions on how to communicate to him that the patch of grass is the potty? I saw something in a previous post about urine-scented stakes. Do you recommend I get one of those?
Thanks in advance for your help!