We live in a flat with no garden so whenever our dog needs the loo we have a 5 minute walk to some grass. Our dog is fully toilet trained and lets us know they need to loo by tapping on and waiting by the door.
i have created a problem I can't fix.
We have a cat who wakes up the dog eat morning about 5am. The cat does go outside but as we are in rented accommodation with no cat flat he can only go out when we open the fire escape to let him out. He always comes back inside after 10/15minutes of his own accord so I don't think the issue is that he wants to go outside…
We take the dog to the loo each night about 11pm and she has been fully walked and tired. Prior to the cat she then wouldn't wake until we stirred.. this may be 7/8/9/10am.
This is where I created a problem due to my own laziness:
as the cat was waking up the dog far earlier than before we got him.. the dog would be tapping the door to go out at 5am. To delay having to get dressed.. put on a cat.. walk the massive (wink wink) 5minute walk to some grass I used to give the dog their breakfast as after that he would always go back to sleep for a few hours.
I didn't realise that of course this taught the dog to associate waking with being fed.. and therefore has been waking earlier and earlier.. not needing the toilet but for their breakfast. Now each morning we get the tap on the door at 430a,/5am and one of us take her out where she does go to t he toilet.. but then when she comes back she continues to tap for her breakfast. As we realised the problem we have stopped feeding her to her old time of 7/8am , however we live in flats and as she isn't getting her usual feed she is barking and destroying our doors from scratching continue sly from 5-7am.
I feel so awful for the neighbours but don't know any solution other than to persist. It has been better these last couple of nights (we have been trying new feed time for last 2 weeks.)
Do we simply have to persist to break the mould of associating waking with eating.. and therefore the dog may go back to not wanting the loo everything 5am?
We can't really shut the cat out the bedroom to stop them waking the dog as when we do the cat destroys all the carpet trying to get into the room with us. As it is rented accommodation it would be great to not loose our deposit completely!
If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated…! Thanks for reading