About two months ago, we had some bad thunderstorms back to back. Two different times when we thought were “breaks” during the storms, we tried to take our 7 yo Aussie out to go potty, and thunder hit just as she was squatting down. Since then she’s been terrified to go potty outside. She’s been very creative in how and where she’ll go, but she’s zeroed in on one corner of the living room. She’ll even partially go outside just so she can go inside when we let her loose for actually going. In the last two weeks we’ve gotten her back to going pee outside atleast, but pooping is a whole nother story. At this point she will go poop inside and then come tell us she needs to go outside to pee.
We’ve done extra praises, we’ve been giving her the good treats for going outside, we try and keep her outside for as long as we can, we keep her close to us if she hasn’t gone outside recently, etc. But there are times where we take her outside, she sniffs the air, and she just gets spooked and insists on going back inside no matter what.
The living room now stinks to high heaven, even after cleaning with enzyme cleaners, and I’m just running out of ideas. Help?