How do you stop a neutered dog from marking territory in your house?
As with most things, the best cure is prevention. By having your dog neutered before they reach the age when they start marking, you can save yourself a lot of trouble. However, that is not always possible.
You may have adopted an adult, unneutered dog, or perhaps you have chosen to hold off on neutering your puppy for other reasons. Whatever the reason, you might find that your dog is long past the age where neutering will prevent marking. Nevertheless, there are still some steps you can take.
As long as your dog isn’t marking every inch of the house, something, or somewhere, triggers it. Identifying a specific trigger, such as a spot, will inform how you address the problem.
For instance, it may be the neighbor’s cat coming for a daily visit or it may be a new male dog in your household. In either situation, it is best to control your dog’s environment and remove the stressor. Another option is to crate your dog if the stressor is temporary.
If your dog focuses on marking a specific spot or in a specific room, the first thing you should do is try to restrict access. Then, if possible, keep your dog away from that area.
Next, you want to clean the spot thoroughly. The marking instinct can get triggered by the smell of a previously marked spot. Because dogs have a very keen sense of smell, it’s important to clean the spot with a purpose-made cleaning solution.
After the spot is clean, you can use a potty training aid, such as a no-go potty training spray, to deter your dog from marking the area again. In addition, you can use a ‘go-here’ potty training spray to assist in training your dog to go to a designated spot.
New items like furniture, appliances, and decor can put your dog in the marking mindset. It can be a challenge limiting your dog’s access to new things in the house. Avoiding a nasty surprise means vigilance, and you will have to monitor your dog around the new thing closely.
Dog’s peeing on the furniture is a common occurrence.
A deterrent spray may help, but if your dog is adamant, it will take direct intervention to stop them from laying claim to your new couch. On the other hand, if you can keep them from marking it, your dog should learn to ignore the new thing as the novelty wears off.
There could be another reason that your dog marks inside. Unseen visitors, particularly strange dogs that come too close to your home, can trigger your dog’s marking instincts. The solution here is less about stopping the behavior and more about addressing the situation.
A dog should receive proper socialization throughout their lives, which usually prevents this behavior. But, if the unfamiliar dogs are marking territory on or around your property, you can’t blame your dog for trying to bolster their claim to the house.
Unsupervised dogs pose a risk, and if possible, you should identify the owners of the dogs and ask them to help find a solution to the problem. If the dogs in question are strays, you must contact animal control or a similar NPO.
It doesn’t always feel great doing so, but stray dogs pose a risk to neighborhood animals, children, and property. It’s the responsible thing to do.
There is always the possibility that your dog is not marking at all. Some medical conditions relating to the urinary tract and bladder can cause behavior that mimics marking. Fortunately, there are distinctions between the behaviors.
The ‘markings’ won’t usually occur in the same spot. Your dog doesn’t think about how the behavior looks to you. If their body tells them to do something in response to a medical condition, they won’t put much thought into it.
If you suspect that your dog might have a medical condition that has them ‘marking’ in or around the house, you must schedule an appointment with your vet. Such infections can start pretty mild but can worsen if they go untreated.
Will my dog mark in the house after being neutered?
Marking in the house after being neutered depends on how old your puppy is when they are castrated. If your dog has marked in the house for months or years, it is less likely that neutering alone will make the problem go away. That is because after marking for a while, your dog has formed a habitual behavior.
For dogs neutered at a late age, marking may be reduced, but will still probably happen when your dog is stressed or aggravated, such as if there is a strange dog hanging around outside.
That often comes as a surprise to first-time dog owners. It is a commonly held belief that a neutered dog doesn’t mark. However, because the behavior goes beyond hormones and may even be instinctive, the behavior won’t always just stop. That is true regardless of whether or not the associated hormones are present.
You might also be interested in knowing if your puppy will bark more after neautering.
How does neutering stop a dog from marking in your house?
In male dogs, territorial marking is an instinctive behavior that is ‘activated’ when their bodies start producing male sex hormones. The hormones, or androgens, are responsible for several aspects of a male dog’s behavior.
One of the most observable behaviors associated with male sex hormones is aggression, especially towards other male dogs. The male dog’s marking behavior ties into that aggression as it all stems from a territorial drive to deter sexual competitors.
When a dog gets neutered, their body doesn’t produce the androgens responsible for that behavior anymore. Therefore many of the associated behaviors fall away. That includes the territorial drive to mark their territory,
Female dogs mostly use markings to communicate territorial messages. For example, these messages can indicate that a female is on heat. Like males, most of the markings that an intact female makes communicate information regarding reproduction and territory.
These behaviors are closely linked to the female dog’s hormones, especially when she enters heat and during pregnancy. When a female dog gets spayed, all of the hormonal imperative she had to communicate through marking is lost. Of course, marking is different for females than it is for males, as they are not lifting their legs to claim territory.
Do neutered dogs still mark?
I can still remember the day, more than a decade ago, when I first realized with horror that our Scottish Terrier, Dubhy (pronounced “Duffy”), was marking in the house. We were trying to sell our Tennessee home at the time, which made the indoor leg-lifting behavior doubly disturbing. Homes with urine stains and odors don’t show particularly well. Dubhy was young, just over a year old. I wrote off the amber-colored stains I found on the heater vent to not-quite-finished housetraining, redoubled my management efforts, and stepped up the “potty outside” routine. It didn’t help. I began to question my professional dog-trainer credentials. Personally faced with persistent indoor marking, one of the more frustrating challenges dog owners encounter, I was not succeeding at resolving it.
Leg-lifting is a natural, normal behavior for dogs, especially (although not exclusively) for males. Of course, like lots of other natural, normal dog behaviors, it’s unacceptable to most owners. Fortunately, most male dogs learn pretty quickly that humans, for some unfathomable reason, don’t appreciate their efforts to tell the world that the house, and all items within in it, are the property of the dog and his family. “Keep your paws off!” he is saying to the world.
Indoor marking is also often a function of stress. Dogs who are anxious about their environment are more likely to mark indoors than those who are relaxed and calm. Stress-related marking is harder to modify than the simple “This is my stuff” leg-lifting. Dubhy was a calm, easygoing, laid-back dude. The idea of stress-induced marking didn’t even enter my mind.
Only after several years had passed did I realize that Dubhy’s indoor marking coincided precisely with the start of his dog-reactive behavior. The dog reactivity emerged as the result of a pair of roaming Labradors Retrievers (who lived a mile away) who repeatedly breached their underground shock fence, visited our yard, and fought through our fence with our indomitable Scottie. I eventually realized well after the fact that the two behaviors were connected. Duh. The stress of the two intruding Labradors set off Dubhy’s marking.
In Dubhy’s case, my initial analysis of incomplete housetraining, although incorrect, was not entirely off base. Indoor marking often begins in adolescent males because it is a natural behavior. Those “easy” cases often respond well to standard housetraining protocols: increasing the dog’s management to reduce his opportunity to mark, taking him outdoors to potty far more frequently, reinforcing appropriate elimination outside, and interrupting any leg lifts you happen to see with a reminder: “Oops! Outside!” Of course, housetraining and/or behavior-modification efforts need to be accompanied by a good clean-up program using an enzymatic cleaner, to eliminate any lingering odor of urine (which invites the dog to mark again). It’s also important to rule out or treat any urinary-tract infections as possible contributors to inappropriate elimination. And don’t forget neutering!
According to Dr. Nicholas Dodman, veterinary behaviorist at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, about 60 percent of intact male dogs will stop urine-marking within weeks or months if they are neutered. Other sources claim as high as a 90 percent success rate post-neutering.
Suffice it to say that neutering is a good first step if your dog reverts back to peeing in the house. This is at least in part because intact male dogs will mark everything in response to the scent of a female in season somewhere in the area, and in part because testosterone in general contributes to the motivation to make a “this is mine” statement. Marking by female dogs will also usually resolve with spaying. Of course, the older the dog and the longer your dog has been practicing the marking behavior, the less likely it is that sterilization alone will fix the problem.
Dubhy, however, was neutered some five months before he started marking. That clearly wasn’t the answer to our dilemma. Nor did our return to a basic housetraining protocol stop his behavior.