u/Benson879

My 6 month old had largely been great with potty training. After the first week or so, he went months without having a true poop accident inside (only exception was when new food bothered him and he had some diarrhea in his kennel overnight, I can’t really count that.) He has had occasional pee accidents, but not a ton overall.

Welp, since last Thursday he’s had about 5 consecutive days pooping inside. Every spot in the same area, up at the top of our stairs somewhere on the carpet.

Think this was my fault. I was reading online about 6 month Cavaliers lasting several hours at a time between bathroom trips. We still were doing them every hour or so because it’s manageable for me working from home. I decided I wanted to stretch them out to every 2 hours or so while awake/not in his kennel to get him used to that habit.

The first several days went great. He was holding it just fine and had no accidents. But what happened though was that we started to ignore his initial outside signals (we have bells on the door) and eventually one of the times lead to him going up and pooping on the carpet. (I think he had the zoomies right before, so it sped things up for him) We’ve since shampooed and enzyme cleaned the carpet, but he’s still doing it. Think it’s less a scent issue, but more an association habit. He developed the connection “the bells no longer work, and this place is a place I can poop now if any urge comes. He seems to be doing it now when it’s not even an urgency.

Anyone else with similar experiences at this age? I’m pretty much banning him from being in that area unsupervised for now until the habits get broken.

Lmao. “They need to prove themselves”

all while putting them behind a completely fluky Bears team and Dallas, among others.. What a load of horse shit.

Have a 6 month old here and a little
freaked out.

I got him up from his nap and he was acting normal.
Suddenly when he came in he briefly seemed to “lose balance” for a brief second, then did the phantom leg air kick right after for a couple seconds then stopped. He wasn’t on his leash or anything. But like exactly the symptom that people talk about. Just was the most random thing.

He was immediately normal after that, even ran upstairs with his normal routine. But everywhere I read says the leg kick is kinda “the sign” He’s otherwise acting completely normal, but I’m aware that he’s at that first age where some start showing signs.

I guess I just want to figure out if this always mean this is what it is or if there’s other possible reasons as well.

So my 5 1/2 month old so far has always stayed leash only outside and I don’t plan on going away from it until we would have a fenced in yard. Going on walks with him, he is finding scents everywhere and wants to take off to find them.

He’s not a massive animal chaser like you would think. Love chasing bugs when he sees them. Mainly loves people and will go after any person he sees.
The one time he did “get out” on us so far was out of our garage about a month ago. He saw our neighbors out across the driveway and got into their open garage.

He doesn’t seem like he actively wants to run away from us intentionally while outside, or actively try to bolt out the door. But my big concern is one of these days if we mess up, I hear they have basically zero outdoor danger instincts. We’re about 1-200 feet away from a pretty busy road, so that definitely leaves me uneasy if he ever got out and saw something way across the street.

Best move just to teach recall as best as possible? We are starting to teach him to stay in position when outside doors open with treat incentives. But doing recall so far has been spotty and hard to train when he’s always inside and we don’t have a fenced yard at this time.