And people who aren’t willing to crate their dog when facing this sort of problem perhaps deserve to live in pee. (Said tongue firmly in cheek.)
I’ve dealt with rescue dogs with all sorts of issues, including many with this exact problem. When they were alone in the house, they were crated, period, no ifs, ands or buts; this included the 16 years I was employed in a normal office job and had regular-to-long work hours plus a long commute. For small dogs with smaller bladders, the crate was big enough for a bed, a water dish and a puppy pee pad. For larger ones who could easily hold it for 9+ hours, just the bed and water. Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of the dog’s natural disinclination to soil her/his bed?
At a minimum, to save your house, confine her to an easily cleaned room, such as a bathroom. But the crating will work better to modify the behavior.
Of course, we’d all like our dogs to have full freedom to hang around the house as they would like while we’re away. But you’re not there right now. That doesn’t mean you can’t get there (again), but you have to just embrace that at this point in time, that’s not an option. Unless you like living in pee, or have fallen madly in love with your Bissell and just want to play with that sucker all the time.
Have you talked to your vet about anxiety, since you mentioned anxiety peeing? You’ve mentioned some OTC products to address that, but in some dogs you need a proper prescription medication. In two of my dogs, an Rx fixed the problem within 24-48 hours. Seriously, a couple of pills tossed down their throats and the nervous peeing was gone. Another memorable one required an Rx plus some very specific behavior modification and self-soothing training, but within a couple of months, again, zero anxiety pees.
You also might consider having an actual behaviorist in to evaluate her and give you some more tools in your kit to deal with her. It seems like a straightforward problem, but oftentimes it is not at all. There could be any combination of as-yet-undiscovered physical problems (yep, even with a clean bill of health from one or more vet visits), mental problems/anxiety, unidentified environmental issues (e.g., did something scare her at some point when she peed outside alone?), and on and on and on. If you can locate a DVM behaviorist who will do an intensive physical workup as well as addressing behavior cause and modification, that would be ideal, but those people can be hard to find.
Good luck! I am sympathetic to your plight, and highly recommend at least starting with the crating and work from there. Your story sounds an awful lot like something happened to make independent outdoor peeing stressful and so your dog is avoiding it.
If you decide to euth, please reach out to rescues or, hell, PM me here. There are people who are very willing to work with this sort of problem and who have had great success fixing it. :yes:
