Afraid of the stairs?

[nichole]

OK...who's Frenchie is afraid of the stairs? George is terrified going down...he barely peeks over the edge...going up on the other hand is not a problem. Is this normal for the breed? We live in a tri-level townhome...stairs are an everyday affair. If the room clears he tends to head "upstairs" looking for excitement...then becomes "stranded", and SCREAMS for help. I place babygates to avoid this...but will he ever conquer the stairs.

I'm concerned for potty training reasons. When on the 1st floor, he actually sat by the front door last night and made a little noise..so I opened the door and low and behold... he ran out and pooped in the flower bed (his new spot)...I almost cried!

I may have made the stair situation worse also. I tried walking halfway down, sitting down and placing him on the stairs facing down, encouraging him a little. This freaked him out and he took off up the stairs. Then he wouldn't come to me. This is now standard operating procedure to go down the stairs. I have to trick him into coming to me, in order to carry him down. Have I traumatized him?

Anyone else dealt with stairs, overcome them, etc...?

[gmacleod]

George is just a baby isn't he? Somewhere around 12 weeks?

Young puppies very frequently have trouble with going down stairs. That's not just because they look big and scary to one so small, but because puppy depth perception isn't fully developed at that age. So he'd have some trouble judging distances - and that just serves to make things bigger and scarier ;) Up rarely seems to be an issue.

Most pups just one day seem to "get it" and once they start going down, they never look back. So I wouldn't worry too much about him at this stage - too much up and down stairs isn't that great for a growing pup anyway.

In time though, you can encourage him by sitting on the second step and tempting him down onto the first one. Once he takes that step, reward him and scoot yourself down to the next one. Keep doing that till you reach the bottom. Like so many things with dogs, pups especially, it helps if you can break things up into little steps and reward/reinforce each one. Once he's managed to go down that way a few times, you can start to ask him to come two steps at a time. Then three. Somewhere around that point, he'll probably get brave enough to take himself down all the way.

[UFshutterbabe]

I was almost started a thread on this topic. As usual, my dog has to do everything opposite - after a couple treats he had no problem going down the stairs, but could not figure out how to move up. I was actually thinking for a while that maybe it was physically impossible for him to pull his fatty butt up the stairs. But today (my b-day, coincidentally) he got all the way upstairs on his own. I couldn't be more proud. It was without encouragement or fanfare from any humans either, we didn't even notice he was up there for probably 10 minutes or so.
When I was teaching Maxwell to go downstairs, I put him in the middle of the stairs, then pointed to and tapped on the next step down and used my excited voice (and had a treat on the step down). While I was doing this, I was always sitting two steps below, sideways, so that my lap covered the stair. That way if he was looking down the stairs, he'd see my cushy lap not far away. I think at first, I had to physically put his front two feet on the stair down until he got comfortable doing it on his own. I also tried to encourage him to go down one step at a time - like, front feet down then back feet and butt down on the stair, pause, then front feet down to the next one... That way he wouldn't build up momentum and loose control. If you decide to try something similar, you might want to have someone sitting two stairs up from the pooch so he can't turn around and bolt upstairs.
Whatever you decide to try, goodluck :)

[Hudson]

He used to go up stairs (two steps from the front yard to the front door) until he missed a step one day and clunked his chin down hard. Now he claims to have forgotten how to do it. Sometimes he still will go up the one step at the front door into the house. He's never even considered going down stairs. The vet said young dogs still need time for the fontenals (soft spots in the skull, but I may have spelled it wrong) to close over, like human babies, so we never encourage it.

Interestingly, one day when he was only about 13 weeks old, a month ago, he was so excited about seeing something in the kitchen that he hit the edge of the sofa at full gallop and just sailed over the edge. He landed on his feet and ran straight into the kitchen. That has never happeded again.