Man's Best Friend

[ChamberNut]

Is this like that shit sandwich metaphor? 

Sometimes ya gotta take a big bite. 

[Don]

Regardless, it doesn't matter.  I don't mind it at all.  We have a small dog (pug).  The fiancee and I are on a rotation basis of who gets to go out and "walk" the dog. 

My wife and I can't rotate the walks.  I prefer to have Jackson on the sidewalk where there's less chance of  glass; my wife finds that Jackson stops to smell plants when he's on the sidewalk, and she has trouble getting him to move on with her (he's 120 pounds).  So she has him on the street.  If we rotate, he doesn't know where the hell his place is.

[ChamberNut]

My wife and I can't rotate the walks.  I prefer to have Jackson on the sidewalk where there's less chance of  glass; my wife finds that Jackson stops to smell plants when he's on the sidewalk, and she has trouble getting him to move on with her (he's 120 pounds).  So she has him on the street.  If we rotate, he doesn't know where the hell his place is.

120 lbs, that's alot of dog! 

[Don]

120 lbs, that's alot of dog! 

And a lot of crap too.

[Anne]

And a lot of crap too.

What kind of dog is he?

Our house sits on 10 acres.  Given that Chows are 1) very easily potty trained as puppies, and 2) very private about their defecation spots, we never knew exactly where they went.  When the last one died, I soon discovered one of his favorite places.  A shrub began to grow beautifully.  Here, all that time I thought it was not getting enough sunshine. 

We had our female bred and finally the puppies were about a month or so old.  There were 4 of them.  I would go to their box and say, "Come on.  Let's go."  Repeating that over and over and going to the outside door of the mudroom, they learned to follow me, and would run right out and urinate, sometimes within 2 feet of the door.  There they were, all 4 of them going at the same time.  It was funny to watch them.  The big problem was to get them to go farther away from the door so I didn't have to hose the area down.  They eventually did go further away.

[Sarastro]

Although diamonds are a girl's best friend, I'd like to have some friends of that kind, too!

[RebLem]

First of all, here in the US, in any city, you can go to a restaurant supply store and get a box of 500 of those small plastic bags that grocery stores use for about $18.00.  The make great poop picker uppers. 

As for watery poop, you need to pay attention to your dog's diet.  I have a 25 lb pug/lab mix I named Scout, and and I feed him a can of Pedigree dog food most days.  I like Pedigree and am fairly brand loyal, because it has a larger number of flavors for its wet dog food than any other brand, so your dog gets more variety.  When his poop gets too watery for my liking, I convert him to dry dog food for a day or two, which binds it up effectively enough. 

I live in a condo, and I don't have a yard.  The condo association, however, did recently set aside a fenced off dog run for pooping, and Albuquerque has about eight off leash dog parks where I take Scout for exercise and socializing (both me and Scout) about an hour twice weekly on average. 

Sometimes I am neglectful, and the dog has to poop in the house.  I have trained him--it was amazingly easy--to poop in the tiled bathroom when he absolutely has to do it in the house, instead of on the carpet.  All you do to train him is look cross at him when he poops on the carpet, and then pet him and praise him extravagantly when he does it on the tile.  One properly praised poop on the tile will generally do it.  Scoop it up with a bit of bathroom tissue, flush it down like you do your own, and then get another wad of tissue, dampen it, and wipe up the area on the floor so every little trace is gone, then flush that.  Not much to it, really.

I found that piss is much more problematic than poop.  Its hard to catch him pissing in the house so you can correct him; poop, you see.  And, poop can be easily cleaned up outside; piss has to stay there, and they want to do it against something live, usually.  If its a bush, it can destroy it after a while.  Poop you can clean up and even if you don't it can be fertilizer, actually beneficial to the soil.  Not so with piss.  When I can't get him to the fenced off area, I try to get him to piss against a large object, like a tree, that won't be destroyed, or one of those little cable TV cylinders that abound.  Also, dogs like to piss on tree stumps.  I found out that various garden supply stores sell very realistic looking--and smelling, apparently--faux tree stumps.  So, at my suggestion, the condo association has bought a few and sunk them into the ground at various places on the grounds.  (My condo is not a single building; its a campus like complex of ten buidings--nine residential, and one community center). Out here in Albuquerque, things on this front are a bit easier than in most places because what are called xeriscaping and xeroscaping are very popular here and in other desert communities.  Grassy areas require watering, which municipalities try to discourage, and landscaping tends to stony areas with a few hardy native plants (xeriscaping} and the same but with trees (xeroscaping).  In communities where grass is ubiquitous, I suppose its a lot harder.