One of the most frustrating things can be when you think a dog is fully house trained, and then they go and do their business while with you in a store. It’s icky, embarrassing, and not exactly fun to other patrons of the store.
So why do dogs do their business in stores and other buildings, even when they’re perfectly potty trained at home? And more importantly, how do you stop this behavior so your dog can come with you wherever you go?
The truth is, dogs do their business in stores for a number of reasons, and the course of action you take to remedy the behavior depends on the reason behind it. In this article, we’ll discuss how to identify which behavior you’re seeing when your dog eliminates in public stores, and the steps you can take to fix each behavior.
And as usual, always rule out a medical issue, especially when dealing with difficulty house training.
Why Does My Dog Pee in Stores?
There are a few reasons that a dog might pee while out with you in stores, even though they don’t pee in the house at home. Those reasons are:
- Marking behaviors
- Excitement
- Lack of generalization
The first, marking, is an entirely separate behavior from potty training. I discuss this in greater detail in my article, How to Stop Dog Marking in the House. The condensed version, however, is that marking is a choice, while the rest of potty training is more of a “gotta go!” situation.
You can tell if your dog is marking in stores by assessing the quantity, frequency, and sometimes stances taken during the urination. Marking is usually small amounts of urine, while true elimination will be more of a puddle. Marking may be more frequent, with a dog making several small pees in an area; elimination will usually be one bigger spot. Marking behavior will usually follow sniffing, and male dogs will almost always lift their leg for marking; they may lift their leg to eliminate, as well, but this is not always the case.
You can determine that your dog is peeing from excitement, fear, or submissiveness by watching their body language and what else is going on around them leading up to them peeing in the store. If a dog is wiggly and waggy and then suddenly pees, that’s excitement peeing. If a dog or person approaches your dog directly and your dog suddenly tucks their tail and pees, you might be looking at fear. And if your dog has an interaction with a person or animal and gives other submissive signals during pee, that is likely submissive peeing.
Finally, you can conclude that your dog is lacking generalization if your dog is new to going out to stores, they are fully eliminating their bladder when they go, and neither of the other two behavioral reasons fits the bill. If your dog is suddenly making big puddles the way they did when they were still house training, chances are they just don’t understand yet that stores count as “inside.”
Why Does My Dog Poop in Stores?
Pooping in stores is almost always from a lack of generalization, or from sheer urgency.
Dogs do not use feces to communicate in quite the same way as they do when they mark an area with urine, so pooping in stores is not a territorial or marking issue. Dogs can lose a level of control over their bowels when it comes to excitement and fear, but this is a lot less common than urination from excitement or fear.
Most times, a dog pooping in the store means that they are not fully house trained, at least not in a way that includes stores! This is the same as it is with urination, and it will come with the same course of action, detailed later on in this article.
Another reason an otherwise house trained dog might do a number two in a store is that it was really, really urgent. Maybe you missed a signal that your dog was giving to indicate, “hey, let’s go outside.” These signals might be:
- Frequent sudden stopping
- Panting
- Whining
- Awkwardness while sitting
- Stress signals in the face, such as wide eyes or forehead scrunching
Not all dogs will signal exactly the same. But if you tend to encounter this issue, consider what your dog was doing leading up to it, and use that information to your advantage in the future.
How Do You Stop a Dog From Eliminating in Stores?
There is a different solution to the problem of eliminating in stores depending on the reasoning behind it. Before setting a course of action, consider why your dog specifically pees or poops when out in stores and choose the response that fits the behavior.
Firstly, marking. Marking is a fairly simple behavior to fix because it is a choice. With marking, we apply a small but direct correction to the dog to communicate that the behavior is inappropriate and to make the behavior less desirable to the dog. Corrections might looks like a small pop on the collar, or a fairly low-level stim on the e-collar.
Timing is important for this, as it is with any other correction. Try to time your correction with the moment the dog begins to life their leg or squat. This may take a repetition or two, and then the behavior usually does not come up again.
Excitement, fear, and submissive peeing is possibly the most difficult to fix of the three, because it relies on increasing your dog’s ability to cope with different types of stress over time. This means getting more regular exposure to the kinds of things that cause the peeing, working on impulse control and self-regulation, and cleaning up plenty of messes along the way.
Ultimately, this comes down to getting your dog out and about more often, until the things that trigger the peeing become “normal” and your dog gets better at holding it under stress.
While you are working on this kind of behavior, your best course of action is most likely to train in pet stores. Pet stores will understand that accidents happen moreso than your local pet-friendly department store. They’ll also have extra cleaning products for you to use while working through messes, and come with built-in excitement in the form of other humans and dogs. Remember to be courteous, and hold off on the “human stores” until your dog is more reliable.
Generalization, or the process of learning a behavior in many different situations, is essentially the same protocol as house training. You can find that protocol in my article, How to Potty Train Any Dog.
If your dog has potty training down at home but has never learned in other places, we need to teach them that it’s the same thing in stores, as well.
Every time you enter a store, make sure you are giving your dog a decent chunk of time to do their business outside. If you’re going to multiple places, make a pit stop to sniff and go potty in between shops. Reward them for each outside potty as if you are on day one of potty training at home. Treats and praise almost always do the trick.
If you see your dog sniffing around in a store like they’re looking to go potty, tell them no and take them outside straight away. Make note of any signals you saw in your dog during your at-home house training, and look for those while you’re out and about.
If your dog does end up making a mess in the store, handle it with grace. You don’t need to correct them for it. Clean it up quickly or alert a store clerk. I like to keep a roll of poop bags and a travel size of disinfecting wipes in my pack, just in case. However I do recommend pet stores for the early phases of this, as well, for the same reasons listed in the details on excitement peeing; remember to always be courteous in human spaces, so we can keep them dog-friendly.
