by Elizabeth Campbell

Created on: September 07, 2008

If you are house-breaking your puppy right, except for the rare exception the only cleaning up you will be doing after your puppy is in the yard! But when your pup does have an accident in the house, it is critical to get it cleaned up properly. Dogs have a natural tendency to go to the bathroom in a location they have used before. As most of us know, dogs have a phenomenal sense of smell, and it is the smell of their previous eliminations that will call them back to the same place again and again.

Generally, when a puppy eliminates, the solid waste is very easy to clean up. Being solid, it does not seep into a floor surface. For a toy pup you can pick up waste using toilet paper and flush the waste down your toilet. If a larger pup or adult dog has a solid accident, use paper towels, or place your hand in a plastic bag which is turned inside out, effectively going up your arm like a glove and sleeve. Pick up the waste, slide the plastic bag down, tie and dispose of it in an outdoor container.

When a puppy urinates inside the house your cleaning routine must remove as much of the urine and odor as is humanly possible. This is a two-step process. The first step is to take an absorbant towel and soak up as much of the urine as possible. To soak up the urine, place the towel directly on top of the urine and apply pressure. Do not rub the towel back and forth. Rubbing back and forth will spread the urine so it is covering a larger area of your carpet. After applying pressure to soak up urine, move to a clean and dry spot on your towel, place it on top of the stain, and apply pressure again. Repeat this procedure until you cannot get any more liquid out of the carpet when applying pressure. As a last step you should stand on top of your towel (which may apply more pressure than you were doing by hand) to see if you can remove any more of the liquid.

No matter how diligent you are about soaking up the stain, there will be some urine left behind. The second step to cleaning a urine stain in carpet is to neutralize the urine that has remained in your carpet and underlying carpet pad. Neutralizing is the process of breaking down the chemicals within the urine that have an odor, to make them odorless. There are many products on the market available for neutralizing urine. You can purchase them from the Internet, a pet store, or a discount / department store. For a neutralizer to work it must completely intermix with the urine in the carpet and pad. Therefore, you need to thoroughly drench the area where your dog urinated with the neutralizer. After placing the neutralizer on the urine spot you simply allow it to air dry. This gives the chemicals ample time to do their job.

Regardless if you are cleaning liquid or solid waste, it is very important to wash your hands after handling dog waste. Solid waste can contain bacteria or parasites which can be transmitted to humans. Even though you are using a plastic bag and/or paper towel, wash your hands thoroughly after disposing of the waste to ensure that you do not have any trace amounts on your skin.

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