I called it “pee pee feet” and I hated visiting my neighbor’s house for it. Their dog peed on the floor every time he got excited which was anytime people came to visit. The worst part was that it was a wooden floor so the dog pee created a big puddle. He danced in the puddle getting his feet sopping wet with dog pee just before jumping up on you. Their dog didn’t just jump on you once, he was up and down and all around making sure to cover you with dog pee from ankle to thigh.

This was long before I ever owned a dog and I didn’t realize there were things they could have done to prevent their dog from peeing in the house or jumping on people. First and foremost they should have put their dog up somewhere when people came to visit even if it was just a baby gate blocking him from their visitors. You should never subject your visitors to bad dog behavior.

Dakota was a bad dog when we adopted her. She jumped, she chewed, she bullied our other dog, she bothered people, she got in our face when we were eating and most of all she peed. Dakota had the problem of being a nervous pee-er. If she was stressed, she peed. If she was excited, she peed. If you raised your voice one iota, she peed. If she was mad at you, she peed. If the urge struck, she peed. While putting the leash on to take her out to pee, she peed – every time.

They have fancy names for the different reasons that dogs pee in the house such as stress pee, excited pee, and nervous pee but the cause is pretty much the same: the dog lacks self control. Dakota came to us as a semi-adult dog with a total lack of self control and it took a lot of hard work to fix her but we succeeded.

We even wrote a book about our experiences in training a problem dog. The chapter on how to stop a dog from peeing in the house is 16 pages long. Today, Dakota routinely spends nine hours with total freedom of the house on our workdays and she doesn’t pee in the house, chew or destroy things, or get in the garbage. We trust her to be a good dog and that’s a pretty big leap considering her awful beginnings with us.

Dakota was a semi-adult shelter dog who was the Queen of Bad Behavior and the Master of Dirty Tricks. Bad Dog to Best Friend takes you from Dakota’s awful beginnings to her amazing transformation.

Bad Dog to Best Friend: The Book The Transformation of Dakota Available in Paperback & Kindle

If you know someone with a bad dog, or even a good dog except that he pees in the house, Bad Dog to Best Friend is the perfect gift. It’s more than a dog training book, it’s the story of one dog’s amazing journey from being a dog that nobody wanted to being a cherished family member.

Too many dogs end up at the dog pound for dog problems and we’re hoping that Dakota’s story can teach people how to fix their dogs instead of abandoning them. Keep the bad dogs out of the dog pound. Instead, transform them into Man’s Best Friend as they were meant to be!

Tags: bad dog, bad dog to best friend, bad dogs, dog, dog pee, dog peeing in the house, dog pees, dog pees in the house, dog potties in the house, dog pound, dogs, excited pee, nervous pee, potty train a dog, potty train an adult dog, potty training a dog, potty training an adult dog, sharon delarose, shelter dog, stress pee, train a bad dog, train a shelter dog, train an adult dog, training a bad dog, training a shelter dog, training an adult dog

Category: Dog Tails of Adventure

Dakota had been progressing. From her early days with us as the most godawful dog imagineable, she had reached a place where she brought us joy and laughter rather than work and frustration.

She’d come a long way from her early days of peeing all over the house, chewing, picking on our other dog, and taking off for the wild blue yonders when outdoors. Dakota is a rescue dog that we adopted from the dog pound when she was seven months old and she was a handful. It took a lot of hard work and dedication to train her. I don’t think many would have committed to Dakota the way we did.

But after two years of hard work, Dakota brought laughter into the house instead of Don’t Kill The Dog sticky notes. Most of her problems had been solved and the ones we were still working on were livable. She was a happy dog. She was also a very strong willed dog, due in part to her lack of early training and in part to her breed which required her to be independent and able to make decisions on her own.

Our other dog, Gypsy Rose, passed away at fifteen years old. We had spent two years intervening between Dakota and Gypsy Rose, one being young and full of spunk and the other being elderly and fragile with age. Dakota tormented Gypsy Rose any chance she got and I never left them unsupervised together, making sure to assert my pack dominance into the fray to make sure Gypsy Rose’s last years were peaceful.

Dakota surprised us by not sniffing around for Gypsy Rose after her passing. Dakota showed no signs of missing her, looking for her, or caring that she was gone. Dakota now had our full attention and she was loving it. She wasn’t designed to be a dog who shared attention. Her competitor was gone and she was happy for about two weeks until she unexpectedly reverted to some of her earlier bad behavior. She’d been doing so well, why was she suddenly being bad?

I’d let her out for potty and she wouldn’t come back in. At first she’d linger just a little longer than usual, then longer and longer until she simply refused to come when called, pointedly blowing me off with her body language. Things came to a head one morning when I was late for work because she decided to gallivant for 45 minutes and I had to revisit some of the training methods I’d used to deal with it before. But the question haunted me… why was she acting up? Why was she suddenly being such a bratty dog? I’d been so proud of her and the progress she’d made with us and now here she was being awful again. Why?

Then it hit me. We’d lost a pack member, a senior member of the pack who’d been in the pack for many years before Dakota joined us. This was Dakota’s perfect opportunity to challenge for Pack Leader and that’s exactly what she was doing. She was challenging me for the role of Leader of the Pack.

Tags: alpha dog, alpha dog challenge, boss dog, challenge for alpha dog, dog chewing, dog not listening, dog training, leader of the pack, pack leader, potty training a dog, training a dog

Category: Dog Tails of Adventure