Please Help Me!

[WitsEnd]

I have a 4 year old female black lab (Molly) that we rescued 2 years ago from a family that had purchased and trained her to use as a bird dog. They got her from a breeder and paid over $500.00 for her. However, she never quite "made the cut" with her skills as a retriever. So the husband abandoned her as a hunting toy and the wife took her over as a pet.

Molly was inside as a puppy, but they said that she defecated in the basement and sometimes peed there as well when they were away overnight. It wasn't a problem for them until they decided to remodel the house. Overnight, Molly went from an inside dog to a completely outside dog (she was about 15 months old at that point as far as I can figure).

Anyway the wife started feeling guilty about leaving her outside all the time (we live in Wisconsin so the winters are pretty bitter), and she started putting out feelers for a new home. That's where we come in...

We decided to give her the benefit of the doubt - that was pretty rude treatment she experienced, after all! We had a typical new dog experience - occassional accidents inside, barking at night, etc. I started her off as though she were a puppy: taking her out to pee every 30 minutes, then every hour, every couple hours, etc. spending one to two weeks at each interval depending on her progress (number of accidents per day). And of course, we always let her out after we fed her. This seemed to be working pretty well, and after about 4 months, she had pretty much stopped having accidents. I work at home, so I was able to be there to let her out whenever she asked - which she started doing at around the 4 month mark.

Then, all of a sudden, she started peeing on the rugs in our living room. We would come downstairs in the morning, and find a huge wet spot - almost always on the same rug. So we removed the offending rug, and she was okay again for another couple weeks, then she moved on to another rug - still in the living room. At this point, we took her to the vet to make sure nothing was wrong with her physically. Nope! Nothing doing on that front.

On the suggestion of the vet and a friend of ours, we tried crate training her. She already had a soft-sided canvas "house" in the living room, which she loved and went in voluntarily, but we got her a standard hard crate, as our friend told us that she would require a hard crate to keep her in if she decided she didn't want to stay there. The first time we put her in the crate (with a treat) she went crazy. She started bashing her head against the door and screaming. We had been warned that some dogs get upset, and to wait it out, but we were afraid she would hurt herself, so we let her out, and she settled down. After that, she refused to go into the crate again, no matter what kind of treat we put in there. So much for that idea.

We went back to Puppy 101, and again, it worked for a while, but the peeing (and occassional pooping) started again. By now, we have been through potty training three times and no longer have any rugs at all in our living room. Until last night, that was the only room she ever peed in. After the third training course, she had been accident free for two months, and we thought, "Well, if all we need to do to solve her incontinence problem is to keep the floor in the living room rug-free, then we can live with that!"

Then last night, right after we gave her dinner, which follows our daily walk, she squatted in the dining room, right in front of my husband, and exactly centered over three oriental rugs, and emptied her bladder, soaking all three. He of course told her that peeing in the house was not okay (in a soft, stern voice - we never yell at her or hit her with a newspaper or anything) and took her outside.

She is one of the sweetest, most loving dogs I've ever met, and we both love her to bits, but we can't keep going through this. I need help! Any ideas you might have would be greatly appreciated! We don't want to find a new home for her, but we may have to. If she is trying to give us some message, we certainly aren't receiving it! HELP!!!