 Pet Talk - Pet Health by Dr. Fran Good, DVM Ketchikan, Alaska April 15, 2002
In today's episode of Pet Health, I want to make sure we don't do anything to send mixed signals to our eagerly-learning young charges. So, to reiterate, if you find a puddle of urine on your floor, you put Rover in his crate - cover it, if he can see what you're doing as there have been reported cases of puppies learning the let's-pee-so-I-can-watch-mom-clean-it-up game - and clean it up. Which isn't as easy as it sounds. Urine is a weak base, which makes cleaning it up a little bit of a chemistry lesson. Since dogs can smell thousands of times better than we can, total neutralization of the ammonia (NH3) molecule that is responsible for urine smelling, has to happen for cleanup to work. Deoderants might work for pitiful critters like us with a weak sense of smell, but to a dog, a deodorized spot of urine just screams 'TOILET', loud and clear. Neutralization of a weak base requires a weak acid. And how many household substances are weak acids? Probably a few are, but I'm no chemist, and the only one I know of is vinegar, or acetic acid. So, blot up as much of the urine as possible with paper towels. Then use a dilute vinegar solution to wipe up solid surfaces, like linoleum. Carpet is a little tougher. You need to soak the area with the dilute solution until it dries, then smell it. If it still smells like urine, soak it again until it doesn't. If you can smell it, your dog most certainly can. For those people who don't like the smell of vinegar, I say you're lucky you live in the twenty-first century. That's because the advent of enzymatic cleaners, that chemically break down and neutralize smelly substances like urine has been a wondrous advance in cleaning. But you have to make sure the label specifies enzymatic breakdown, otherwise it's a deodorant, pure and simple. Outright ™ is one of the products with which I am familiar, but there have been quite a few others that have come out recently. Do not use soap until after you have neutralized the urine. Soap tends to fix urine, and so will make it harder to neutralize, once it's been washed. Next week: Summary of potty-training rules
Digital photo of Patty La Belle by Mary Kauffman.
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Last episode, we learned that using
punishment to teach potty training doesn't work, and, more often
than not, results in making our dogs unnecessarily frightened
of us. And in prior weeks, we learned how to teach our dogs that
they were doing the right things.