Dog (age 1) has started doing poo during night on the carpet

[joca]

Can anyone offer any advice?? My mum's dog is 16 months old - a Jackadoodle - and has been house trained for over a year, but last week he started doing a poo on the carpet during the night, five nights in a row now. He isn't unwell, not having diarrhoea, no changes to his diet or routine or anything else to make him anxious. We have tried feeding him earlier in the day, taking him out later in the evening, but even when he was taken out at 9pm and 11pm, he had done another poo on the carpet when my mum went to check on him at 3am.

 

[gypsysmum]

My new rescue dog was dong this.

I started by going back to basics and taking him out to poo and giving him a, high value, reward for doing a poo in the garden. It has to be immediate, not when he comes in. This helped a lot.

If a dog has been chastised for doing a poo, anywhere inappropriate, they can become very wary of doing a poo when people are around. They wait until they have gone to bed, or gone out, when they feel safe from chastisement. They do not make the connection that the poo will be found later. They just need to feel safe from human anger so they wait until they are alone. It is, therefore, best to just ignore the dog and clear up the mess in order to not make things worse!

If this is what is happening he may not want to poo in the garden at night, because he thinks people get angry around poos, so a little walk may help him to empty before bedtime.

If the above is not the case then another possibility is that he is scared of the dark and needs company??

After a while, with my rescue dog, we were getting a poo occasionally during the night. After lots of head scratching, and more rewards for pooing in the garden, and observing him, we realised it was when he was given a bone to chew sometime during that day. The fragments of bone were, we think, irritating his bowel and making it hard for him to hold on to his poo. Since we have stopped giving him bones the poos have stopped.