As anyone who has owned a puppy can tell you, it’s fairly easy to house-train a dog.  If you control the intake, you can control the elimination.  Don’t allow unlimited access to water, or be prepared to clean up lots of messes.  It’s quite simple.  Lloyd was extremely easy to train, but to this day he is “very motivated” by water.  He loves water.  It’s not that he doesn’t get enough, trust me, he pees every time we take him out and that’s a lot.  It’s just that if he has access to water, he drinks it until it’s gone.  It’s a challenge to him, one that the water MUST NOT win.  This is easily seen when we fill up his pool in the backyard (yes he has a pool, how the heck else are we going to keep 180 lbs of furry meat cool in the summer?).

If Lloyd has his pool full of water, he sees it as his enthusiastic duty to drink the whole thing dry.  He literally drinks until he’s bursting before he will admit that the pool contains more water than is comfortable to drink.  The rest of the water he attempts to absorb with his face, ears, and coat.  This works pretty well, he’s much like a living, slobbering, burping ShamWow.  Pool time requires some planning to run successfully.  Ideally, you would fill the pool and let Lloyd have his drink and romp in the pool which requires much jumping and splashing and pretend digging with huge paddle-sized paws.  Then, an hour and a half BEFORE when you want to have backyard time to be done, the pool has to be drained.  Lloyd is visibly ticked at this, but it has to happen so that the bladder emptying can begin.  This dog can hold a significant portion of that pool in his belly, and it has to start getting out before he can be allowed back in the house.  It’s not his fault, really.  He’s just so full it starts leaking out before he really realizes it.  I have literally watched him pee in the backyard at least 3 times in 4 minutes, impatiently stopping to go in mid stride.  He has no concept of how much pee he has, so it’s a nuisance to have to go so often.

This is the reason that makes it important for Lloyd to not have access to unlimited access to water inside the house.  Unfortunately for us, he figured out right away that the toilets are basically a bottomless water bowl, conveniently located throughout the house.  We have been trying to keep all of the toilet lids down, but with 5 humans and three toilets it’s hard to enforce.  I can tell right away when Lloyd has located a bowl left open.  For one, there’s no water left in the thing, he drinks it down to the limit of his reach.  Indeed, I have found him with one paw inside the bowl, the better to reach to the bottom.  Secondly, the water that is left has been transformed into a viscous, thick substance created with drool containing bubbles that mysteriously never pop, grass bits, and chunks of milkbones or food that have been flushed out of his jowls by the good clean toilet water.  Let’s just say that he isn’t all that subtle.  Then I immediately start looking for him so I can take him outside to begin The Emptying again.

The vet says that a dog his size needs about 2 litres of water a day.  Keep in mind he’s only about 49 lbs at the moment.  We are most looking forward to Lloyd’s growth in only one place:  his bladder.