My Senior Dog Is Having Accidents In The House

And 4 things that helped us when this happened with our senior dog…

Pet parents will often tell me, “It’s like she would forget to ‘go’ when she was outside.”

Well. That definitely is possible. This week, on the podcast we are covering the top 4 signs of doggy Alzheimer’s. And House soiling is one of them!

For Becca, my current 15 year old lab mix, she started having an occasional accident in the house at random. Even if we just let her outside. She’s been potty trained ALL OF HER LIFE and is one of the best, most behaved dogs a girl could ever ask for! So why is she doing this?

If your senior dog is peeing in the house, there can be a lot of different causes. The first step to figuring out the cause is: schedule a trip to the vet.

With Becca, she has had several UTI’s in the past and sometimes they are what we call ‘silent’ UTIs where we don’t even know anything was wrong with her until it would show up on a routine urinalysis. So a trip to the vet can allow them to examine your pet for any illnesses and do any diagnostics like a urinalysis, bloodwork or x-rays.

After we ruled out medical causes (Becca’s bill of health was clean)- we narrowed it down to behavioral.

You see, we realized Becca occasionally forgets to actually potty when we let her outside sometimes. And, now that she’s older, she’s unable to hold it as well as she used too.

So we’ve done a couple of things to help her out:

1st: we go out with her and make sure she does business everytime she goes outside.

2nd: we keep tabs on her by checking a urine sample at the vet every few months to make sure those sneaky silent UTI’s don’t come back and doing her semi annual vet visits

3rd: we give her an extra potty break or two to help give her the time she needs to go potty

4th: we started her on a diet high in medium chain triglycerides that has been shown to slow the signs of disease (we’ll talk about this in upcoming episode)

These are not things I recommend for everyone, but this is what helped with our sweet senior dog Becca. To learn more signs of cognitive decline, check out Episode 8 of the Senior Dog Revolution Podcast.