Stop Dog Digging

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I want to teach a simple yet effective message on how to fix digging. And I’m referring, of course, to your dog digging in your yard, pulling up your stuff and ruining things. This is what I call my Poop Trick. It sounds disgusting, with poop in the title. Guess what, it is disgusting…most of the time.

So, when you’re about to do the poop trick, put your dog somewhere that’s not your back yard. Put them in a crate. Put them in the house. Don’t let him see you doing this. What you want to do is go gather up as much as your dog poop as you can and fill up a hole with poop. I know, it sounds disgusting but it tends to work.

What happens is most of dogs are disgusted by their own poop so when you fill up a hole, what happens is they later - dogs being creatures of habit, they tend to go back to their whole, they dig it up and they’re kind of corrected. So you might fill up the hole with their poop today and your dog, three days from now, might start to dig it up and stands corrected at that point. So, it is a way you can correct your dog without even seeing your dog do it I guess is the best way to put it.

Don’t let your dog see you filling up the hole with poop because if he sees you doing it he might think, “Hey, what are you doing with that hole over there. That looks fun let me come mess with that.” So, what you want to do is fill up every hole, cover it up about an inch or two of dirt and just leave it.

Repeat as necessary. What I mean by that is some dogs they’re going to be like, “That’s gross. I dug up a hole so they’re going to dig a new hole. Guess what? You’ve got to do that one. And they might dig a new hole. You’ve got to do that one. They might dig a new hole. You’ve got to do that one. And so, most of the time, I find anywhere between one to six repeats is about the average. Some people have to fill up five or six holes but what happens here is sooner or later the dog starts to realize the law of averages here that, “I’m finding more holes than not that are full of poop. This is kind of a disgusting habit.” And the dog stops doing it.

And again, I have a lot of success with this method. Not a hundred percent. In my DVD course, I go onto other methods on how to fix digging but this method is often quite good. Now, it’s best if combined with exercise. A lot of dogs are digging simply because they’re bored and they’ve got pent up energy, and so if we can give them some extra exercise we can typically be in good shape as far as helping them even further to get over this problem.

And that’s it. I called it the poop trick. If I had to put a number on it, probably seventy percent of the time it works. With five to six repeats of filling in that hole, every now and then, two or three dogs out of ten or so, it seems that we’ve got to do other methods to kind of help them get over their digging problem. It’s a very simple method. It’s a little bit disgusting, but quite effective. So, if you’ve got a dog that’s digging, go grab some dog poop and fill up those holes. Time to get to work.