My newly-adopted dog, Ava is...well...she's peeing near her food. I know! Gross! The other two dogs agree. That's gross. So I feed all three of them, they are mostly finished eating and I exit the kitchen, and when I come back, Ava has peed on my beautiful new Mahogany finish engineered flooring.
Rude, right? Not having EVER experienced this unsavory behavior in any other dog (in a long line of adopted and quirky dogs, I assure you), I sought out advice from the experts.
The overwhelming responses were as follows:
A: Ava is guarding her food, by marking it as hers with her scent. If that's not it, she's at disquieted enough about food issues to not be comfortable leaving her dish unattended with food still in it.
Bottom line: we have a girl with food issues.
Hey, I'm right there, i have food issues too. I get it! I eat fast because in my food-obsessed family, if you didn't eat it all, someone else would finish it for you, right off of your plate (oh, you know who you are).
Hence my...well that's a different blog.
Back to Ava: The recipe for success appears to be four-fold:
1. Supervise dinner, until Everyone has eaten their fill.
B. Pick up Everyone's food as soon as they have finished.
Then. Immediately after dinner, direct entire clan outside for elimination.
4. Practice this until such time as you witness the dogs leaving the kitchen and going outside on their own to pee and poop, as soon as you pick up their dish.
I'll let you know how it goes.
