As anyone who has owned a puppy can tell you, it’s fairly easy to house-train a dog.\u00c2\u00a0 If you control the intake, you can control the elimination.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t allow unlimited access to water, or be prepared to clean up lots of messes.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s quite simple.\u00c2\u00a0 Lloyd was extremely easy to train, but to this day he is “very motivated” by water.\u00c2\u00a0 He loves water.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not that he doesn’t get enough, trust me, he pees every time we take him out and that’s a lot.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that if he has access to water, he drinks it until it’s gone.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a challenge to him, one that the water MUST NOT win.\u00c2\u00a0 This is easily seen when we fill up his pool in the backyard (yes he has a pool, how the heck else are we going to keep 180 lbs of furry meat cool in the summer?).<\/p>\n
If Lloyd has his pool full of water, he sees it as his enthusiastic duty to drink the whole thing dry.\u00c2\u00a0 He literally drinks until he’s bursting before he will admit that the pool contains more water than is comfortable to drink.\u00c2\u00a0 The rest of the water he attempts to absorb with his face, ears, and coat.\u00c2\u00a0 This works pretty well, he’s much like a living, slobbering, burping ShamWow.\u00c2\u00a0 Pool time requires some planning to run successfully.\u00c2\u00a0 Ideally, you would fill the pool and let Lloyd have his drink and romp in the pool which requires much jumping and splashing and pretend digging with huge paddle-sized paws.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, an hour and a half BEFORE when you want to have backyard time to be done, the pool has to be drained.\u00c2\u00a0 Lloyd is visibly ticked at this, but it has to happen so that the bladder emptying can begin.\u00c2\u00a0 This dog can hold a significant portion of that pool in his belly, and it has to start getting out before he can be allowed back in the house.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not his fault, really.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s just so full it starts leaking out before he really realizes it.\u00c2\u00a0 I have literally watched him pee in the backyard at least 3 times in 4 minutes, impatiently stopping to go in mid stride.\u00c2\u00a0 He has no concept of how much pee he has, so it’s a nuisance to have to go so often.<\/p>\n
This is the reason that makes it important for Lloyd to not have access to unlimited access to water inside the house.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately for us, he figured out right away that the toilets are basically a bottomless water bowl, conveniently located throughout the house.\u00c2\u00a0 We have been trying to keep all of the toilet lids down, but with 5 humans and three toilets it’s hard to enforce.\u00c2\u00a0 I can tell right away when Lloyd has located a bowl left open.\u00c2\u00a0 For one, there’s no water left in the thing, he drinks it down to the limit of his reach.\u00c2\u00a0 Indeed, I have found him with one paw inside the bowl, the better to reach to the bottom.\u00c2\u00a0 Secondly, the water that is left has been transformed into a viscous, thick substance created with drool containing bubbles that mysteriously never pop, grass bits, and chunks of milkbones or food that have been flushed out of his jowls by the good clean toilet water.\u00c2\u00a0 Let’s just say that he isn’t all that subtle.\u00c2\u00a0 Then I immediately start looking for him so I can take him outside to begin The Emptying again.<\/p>\n
The vet says that a dog his size needs about 2 litres of water a day.\u00c2\u00a0 Keep in mind he’s only about 49 lbs at the moment.\u00c2\u00a0 We are most looking forward to Lloyd’s growth in only one place:\u00c2\u00a0 his bladder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As anyone who has owned a puppy can tell you, it’s fairly easy to house-train a dog.\u00c2\u00a0 If you control the intake, you can control the elimination.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t allow unlimited access to water, or be prepared to clean up lots … Continue reading