Why won't my Chihuahua poop when I know he has to?

I just came upon this site a year later then the above blogs because I was just looking for training tips to print out for my co-worker. We had the same problem with our Chihuahua. She would go outside and pee, and them come in the house and poop inside. Her previous owners would rub her nose in the pee or poop and that is CRUEL. She had trust issues, was scared and nervous when you went to pet her and gee I wonder why. Do you want someone forcefully taking you to do anything? No.

That is an old school training method that does not work and is not very humane. I would not want my nose shoved in my own feces, how would you like it? Next time you take a crap in the toilet look at it, smell it, and picture your head being forcefully pushed into it.

The roughness of the grip when shoving the nose in poop will make her scared. She will be apprehensive of you in the future and may hide to eliminate in an unoccupied part of the house. You should never exert physical punishment on a dog, and that is considered physical punishment, as per the ASPCA as well.

While it may scare the dog from relieving herself in the house…it also does frighten her for whenever she needs to defecate (even outside) and will cause uneasiness and health problems with her from an inability to remove wastes properly. A less extreme alternative would be to pen the dog in an area of the house for time out, or just send her outside for a little while. The dog will not understand “this sort of mistreatment” and will develop trust issues. There’s nothing worse than a dog that is afraid of her own master. This even leads to temper issues.

Needless to say we STOPPED mistreating the dog by not putting her nose in it and used the training methods I spoke about above and it worked, she started going outside, and she even became more trusting of us. If your parent forcefully did something to you would you like them as much? No, you wouldn’t. I would hope you got your dog for a companion so I would really hope you wouldn’t want them to have that feeling. So please, take some pity on the poor thing…dogs (like people) of all ages are going to have accidents sometime.

*I’ve had over 25 years of training dogs!

Dogs don’t relate to that kind of punishment to the crime. All it really does is teach them to pee or poop sneakily in the house, and when you’re not around, and teaches them that your mean. Dogs respond WAY better to positive reinforcement. Good luck!

Well… my chihuahua was scared of grass when he was a puppy, he didn’t like the feeling of it and didn’t like walking on it either. That could be a reason. The only way we ever got him to go outside was to just leave him out there until he went. It’s not a cruel thing to do… the dog just needs to know that once he does his business outside then he can come inside. Usually after he went outside we told him good boy and gave him a small treat like a cheerio. It helped a lot. There are times where he won’t go outside because it’s raining or snowing so we let him out in the front yard to go and that helps. If our dog pee’s in the house we rub his nose in it and tell him “no” and “outside” then put him outside.