How can I get my adult dog to poop where I want, when I want?

Can you poop on command? Maybe he's just not ready. Have you tried waiting 20-40 minutes before taking him out? Its also possible that what you're actually training him is poop = end of walk. Dogs love walkies, they want to be outside, they need lots of exercise, if he only gets out to go poop then he'll make it last as long as he can. Dogs also like treats. Our dogs were trained with choc-drops as reward, never had much trouble getting them to go - unless they weren't ready to go yet.

babies need to crawl around a bit before they can do a poo (once they're on solids). i imagine dogs are the same. being horizontal and all. good luck possum. dog poo sucks (sticks? ;-)) when it's not where you want it, when you want it to be there.

This is what I did for my dog: Whenver he pees or poops anywhere acceptable, use the cue word that you want. Then reward the instant the act is done. For pooping, some dogs do take a little bit of walking to get started. This is normal. If you are determined to make him go in a specific spot, pace around at the stop, don't stand still. An area roughly the size of a bathtub tends to be ideal as it is large enough to get things moving but not so far that it's new or even remotely exciting. It willtake some time. Basically if you are going to wait him out, do so consistently for a while. Same spot every day, pace around until he goes then praise, treat and take him on his walk. If you stay for 20 minutes and get bored then let him poop where he wants, he learns that eventually he will get to go where he wants. For me I spent several weeks letting my puppy choose his spot but using the cue word and once I was sure he had a connection down, then started using it to trigger the act. If you go the other way, it will take time and a lot of patience.

My mom taught her dog to start pooping by waiting until the dog was ready and then saying, "Get started." Eventually she could say "get started" and the dog would know to stop running aimlessly and start seriously sniffing around for the perfect spot to poop. However, none of her dogs ever pooped immediately after going out. Maybe that's not how their digestive system works. They all had to run around a bit. So you might reach your goal of having your dog poop WHERE you want, but maybe you should resign yourself to letting the dog run around for twenty or forty minutes. He needs the exercise anyway.

Do you know anything about the dog's medical history? My dog had a huge cyst on her butt that eventually got infected and had to come off. When the vets sewed her up, they didn't have a lot of skin to work with, and so ended up giving her a "butt lift" by way of the tension of the scar. So now she has a really hard time pinching off, and takes a lot longer. She sniffs around more, too, and I think in her case it's the dog equivalent of reading on the toilet. Since it's going to take a while anyway.... This happened to my dog when she was older, though. She'd already been going in a specific zone of our yard, and still does. When we initially trained her, we laid a board against our fence and taught her that she was supposed to go anywhere further back than the board. So my suggestions are, make sure there's nothing going on medically creating this need to take so long, and use a visual cue to show the dog where you want him or her to go, in addition to what you're already doing.

What I want is to get the dog to pee and poop (when he needs to) in a designated area when we first go outside, and THEN we can walk around I don't know that you'll be able to -- you can train dogs a lot, but the digestive system is still going to have some say. I've had my dog 4 years and he never poops as soon as we go out. He needs to walk, run, or play before he's ready to poop. He'll pee whenwe first go out, but he'll also stop and pee continuously throughout the entire walk. I hope you don't expect your dog to pee once and be done; most dogs don't work that way. Maybe you can train him to poop where you want, but after your walk, once he's had a chance to move around a little. And by "train him" I mostly mean train yourself to recognize when he's almost ready to poop, and get him to the spot where you want him to go. Eventually he'll associate that spot with pooping and want to "go" there. Maybe eventually he'll want to start pooping there when you first start the walk, but you can't necessarily count on that. And I think it's better for the dog if you let him poop when his body says it's time to poop. Why do you care so much exactly when he does it, as long as you're outside on his walk?

Good advice already. Just like with people, a dog either has to go, or it doesn't. You can certainly form an association in the dog's mind between a cue word and the act (I do this, and it's the single most useful thing I have ever taught my dogs), but if there isn't a "round in the chamber" so to speak, no amount of wishing and hoping is going to make the dog able to defecate, and many dogs need a fair bit of walking before they're ready to go (you will always have to carry poop bags if you're out with the dog, no matter how successful you are at training a cue for this behaviour, and you must always remember that you are at best letting the dog know that now and here would be a good time and place for taking care of business, but this is NOT a truly trained behaviour, and there should never be punishment or anything else negative associated with not going when told). I try to use my backyard for getting my dogs empty before we go for a walk (because I'd rather not carry a bag'o'poop with me on a walk if I don't have to), but they have a whole lot of room to run around and get things going there, and it doesn't always work if I have limited time. What I would do is this: walk the dog on a leash around near the area you want him to use as the bathroom. When you start seeing signs that pooping is imminent (sniffing, circling), encourage the dog over to the bathroom area and just stand there, stand still but give the dog enough leash to move around as much as he likes, while staying in the same general area, as soon as pooping starts, praise with a CALM voice, interspersed with your desired poop cue (I use Ian Dunbar's term of choice: "get busy", because it's something I never say under any other circumstances, and it's a whole lot less embarrassing to chant at a puppy than "POOPIES!"), so I'd see the dog "assume the position" and say in a calm, pleased voice: "good get busy, good dog, gooooood get busy", and then BIG praise and a cookie when he's done, plus "let's go for a walk" (or whatever term you use for walkies), so that the walk becomes in some part a reward for pooping on cue and in the right area. It's much easier to do this with urination, in exactly the same way.

I had the same problem with my greyhound. He learned to pee in a specific area within a few days after we adopted him, but poop was a different matter. And I learned from experience that no matter how long we waited in the yard before we went out on our walk, he wouldn't go. Get five or six houses down the block, though, and all of a sudden he's starting to give me his traditional "poop signs" (tail out ramrod straight, starting to squat). I thought it had something to do with Trai's love of going for his walk that he was too distracted to think about pooping before we left home, but when I mentioned it to the vet, he said that most dogs need some strenuous exercise to get the ol' poop muscles working. My advice is to do what we did - carry a pooper scooper bag with you of some sort on your walks and let the chips (as they were) fall where they may.

Ditto on the pooch needing time before the poop - that's been my experience with my pug as well. If you're really stuck with this idea, maybe play indoors (fetch, chew toy, something?) for 20 min or so before going outdoors might help get things going.