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.
Will my dog urinate in the house after being neutered?
There is a difference between urinating and marking, and neutering may only help if your male dog is marking. Marking is when a dog intentionally urinates on the spot to mark its territory. On the other hand, urinating is when your dog relieves their bladder.
Since marking is only something a male dog should begin doing when their hormones are kicking in, it is unlikely that a puppy is marking.
An adult, unneutered male will typically lift his leg to mark, usually smelling the area first. There may only be a small amount of pee, and it is usually against something vertical, like a wall.
Occasionally, they may do it out of frustration, such as peeing on your bed if you have been gone a long time. Typically, a dog marks if he is new territory, or if a strange new animal is close by. Neutering does typically reduce this behavior.
However, if your dog is urinating in the house, and you don’t believe they intend to mark their territory, several possible causes and solutions exist. Usually, when a dog urinates indoors, it’s down to poor house training.
Your first step is to assess whether your dog needs retraining. If your dog isn’t fully house-trained, you can read our article on Puppy Still Not House-trained: Age expectations.
Training an adult dog can be challenging, depending on the breed and its associated temperament.
What’s the Difference Between Peeing and Marking?
Your dog may pee inside if they haven’t been let out enough, if they have a small bladder, or for many other reasons. But the peeing will result in a full puddle of urine.
Whereas, dogs that urine mark will only squirt out a small amount of urine and will often do it on the same spot or object.
Although it’s natural behavior, it’s certainly not acceptable in the house. Furniture, floors, walls, and other items are ruined or damaged when your dog decides to claim them as his own.
Urine marking is not the result of faulty housebreaking. In fact, most of the time, urine marking can be curbed with behavior modification.
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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.