I attended a class on gardening taught by a vet. She reccommended giving the dog a seperate place to dig. At first you create a plce that is full of nice soft dirt...they like your new beds because the dirt is fun. So you hide treats and toys in this separate bed for them to find. It is a training time and you praise for digging in the separate bed and discipline for digging in the wrong place.

She said that you need to stay outside quite a bit to be there and train them. The discipline you do for your dog is what you use for training...some people have a certain word or noise...some a newspaper or spray water and vinegar mix.

hope this helps!

Well.....I have a co-worker that claims she trains dogs for search and rescue. She says to fill the holes with water and submerge the dogs head in the water,hold it's head under,count to 10. I've told other people how cruel I thought that was and they said it was "what your supposed to do".

PS....is it not a dogs nature(not curable) to dig.......unless you have a herd dog. :0)

Any discipline has to be immediate. If the dog dug the hole and you held its head under water an hour later, the training effect would be zilch.

My dogs used to dig, until I started filling the holes with their own waste. They had a favorite area to dig, and won't go near it now that its all filled with poo. It took at least a full summer to train them (with lots of NO being yelled out the kitchen window) but it worked!

Nicole... I don't know what's wrong with your co-worker but that's just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Maybe someone should hold her head under water.

OK Monica!!!! Let's hold her under and count to 10! Bet she sues us! How cruel!!!!!!!

You can buy a shock collar pretty reasonable from Cabelas. Some of them work up to 300 yards away. So if you are in the house and catch your dog digging out back you can give him a little shock to remind him not to be digging in a certain spot. Many hunters train their dogs with shock collars. They do not torture the dog like one might think. I have found mine very useful. There are even tones on the remote for praise if your dog is obedient. Most collars come with a training video on how to use them appropriatley.

There was a story all over the news here in Utah a few years ago about a couple who had been arrested for unbelievably horrendous animal cruelty. They had been caught by some neighbors holding their dogs head in a hole full of water. According to the story they were facing 6mo in jail and thousands of dollars in fine. Since the news never follows up on these type of stories, I have no idea what the outcome of their trial was, but I'd advise against using that particular technique.

Digging is an instinctive behavior. DogÂs wild relatives dig both to obtain food (primarily small rodents) and shelter (dens). You are far better off redirecting instinctive behaviors to non-destructive settings as the vet suggested rather than trying to remove them entirely.

Remember positive reinforcement alone is more effective than negative reinforcement alone, but using both together is best. Any technique that provides IMMEDIATE negative reinforcement for bad behavior and postive reinforcement for good behavior will work given enough time. Pick a training plan that uses both and be consistent with it.

Our dogs only irregularly dig, and as we also irregularly have moles I figure they're digging for them and so try to neither encourage nor discourage them.

But I find that the dogs dig less when they have lots of other things to keep them interestested - chew toys, balls, and one thing that they love is a tug toy tied to a tree limb with a bungee - they can pull it way back, and the elastic provides some "live" variable resistance for them (unlike a rope, where the resistance is all-or-nothing). These things both keep them occupied and tire them out so they're less likely to dig.

Another option is to build a fenced run area -- it doesn't have to be small, but basically is just an area that you're "sacrificing" to the dogs. I've seen people plant the dog run fence with climbing roses, clematis, etc. such that it actually looks really attractive (and provides summer shade for the dogs).

When I was a child, the gardners in our neighborhood trained their dogs not to dig in their flower beds by placing prickley pear cactus peices in all of the holes, and burying some in others. I remember watching our dog standing there, looking down at the cacti. I don't think he ever got pricked badly. Dogs will approach a new thing in their playground very cautiously; smelling, and touching carefully with their noses and paws. They seem to know that prickley pears are to be avoided. Dixon

Dixon.....when I was a kid,I set my prickly pear outdoors to get some extra sun. My german shepard must have sniffed it,was pricked by it,then she attacked it!!! The vet had to sedate her to pull the spines out of her tongue,she had internal bleeding. The ones in her paws broke off,festered and we pulled them out a month later!!!!!

No,no,no,no.........

My 1.5 year old pup, Hilde, goes into a doggie-trance if we give her a new bone or chewy treat. She runs around the house, frantically looking for a place to bury her treasure. If we forget to close her doggie door, she'll take it outside, dig a big messy hole, and bury it. After she's buried it, she leaves her doggie-trance and completely forgets she ever had a new bone. If we tell her to "go get your bone" and she gives us a dumb look. Typically if we tell her to get her "ball", "toy", an older "bone" that has been rescued from its burial grounds, or the "kitty", she'll go get it (or, in the case of the cat, go bother it.)

Would it be possible for you to cover the grass with a large-holed chicken wire type product? That might discourage your dogs from digging, but then you'd need to pull it up in the spring when you want to start using the lawn again. I used a similar method to keep my cats from digging in the raised garden beds.

I wonder if you could lay chicken wire down before laying sod?

-Celestial

I had a pitbull that dug thru buried chicken wire, thru buried boulders, thru buried logs and afew other things before I finally stumbled across something that she couldn't dig thru and she stopped digging [ Period ]. That thing was chain link fencing, laid right ontop of the ground, where she liked to do most of her digging. As far as training a dog, to be well behaved, I have never owned or met a dog, that didn't understand the words [ SHAME ON YOU ] stretching the word SHAME and looking them in the eye. Good Luck

Nicole,

I can't believe you would even post something on a website suggesting holding a dogÂs head under water. Dogs will start to breath shortly after their head is submergedÂthus drowning the dog. It is irresponsible to post this on a websiteÂ.YOU should be sued.

Then hold your head under water, drown yourself....digging dogs won't be a problem ever again! Good Luck!!!

Well, this may or may not get read, but here is what my husband and I came up with . . .
First, I don't like dogs. I grew up around them all my life and have a few that I really loved, but on the whole I'm happier with my two cats. Our dog is my step-daughter's dog so the dog stays until she graduates from high school and moves out.
Anyway, I think this dog knows that I don't like her because she never digs in our garden until after I have planted something. She also waits to dig up my plants at night when everyone has gone to bed or gone out for the evening.
The final straw was last night when I came home from church to find she had dug up and ate half of the new bulbs I had just planted. To thwart her plans we invented a doggie gate that can either lay down on top of a bulb bed until the flowers pop up in spring (whereby you'd take it off) or stand up and surround the plants. We'll be making the frame roughly the size of a window frame with chicken wire where the glass would be. Does this make sense? The two frames will be hinged together to surround new plantings, but also allowing it to lay flat over a bulb bed. When we make them I'll show pictures.
My brother used to make barriers like this around our chicken coop to prevent coyotes and foxes from getting in.
Heather

My diggingest dog is deaf, so yelling "No" is no good. I've realized my dogs don't dig when I'm in the yard with them. My solution: I don't leave them unsupervised in the yard. They're either in the house with me, in the truck with me, or in the yard with me. Except for short pee trips, they're never in the yard WITHOUT me.

Well, I had the same problem with dogs digging. I went to the hardware store and bought 15 very small mouse traps ---the ones with the fake plastic cheese thingy attached to the the metal part of the trap. I set the traps in all the favorite places for digging. I never heard my dogs yelp from pain nor did the traps attach themselves to the dogs. That ended the digging (it toke about a month or so and I went out several times a day to reset the traps)--- I think the noise of the traps going off startled them and they disliked being startled. I came up with this "startling idea" when several dog trainers suggested that you throw down a soda can with marbles inside ---all taped up with no sharp edges--- when a dog misbehaves because they dislike being startle.

Have the mousetraps continued to work?