[pyrnet] Peroxide & a House Training Question

[Jessica Crouch <jrc@cs.unc.edu>]

Hello everyone --

     My husband is a physician, and I asked him about our earlier
discussion about whether hydrogen peroxide is damaging to tissue.  He said
that it is generally not adviseable to clean an uninfected, shallow open
wound with hydrogen peroxide or alcohol because the disinfecting chemicals
will kill the tissue at the exposed edges of the wound.  This could
lengthen healing time and increase scarring.  Such a wound should be
cleaned with water and allowed to heal.  An infected or deep wound should
be treated by a physician or vet.  However, he said that no damage should
result from using hydrogen peroxide if the skin is not broken, as I think 
would be the case for a hot spot.

     Now a bit of history for my question:  We adopted Nina from pyr
rescue in Feb. She was 14 months at the time and joined our male pyr
Isaac, who is 2 months older.  According to the history we were given she
had lived in 4 different places in her first year and might have been a
bit neglected along the way, but there was no knowledge of abuse.  She is
very sweet and friendly and seemed to adapt to life with us easily.  In
the beginning she was pretty clingy, wanting to maintain physical contact
with a person all the time.  She still likes to cuddle, but now is more
comfortable spending time outside or in another room without a person.

     She seemed to be house trained when she arrived.  She had a couple of
accidents in the house in the first two weeks, but I chalked that up to
the stress of the transition period.  After that she seemed fine for a few
weeks, but then had another accident.  For the last several months she has
been averaging about one acident a month.  It's quite frustrating because
we let her outside frequently, and if she would let us know she needed to
go we would let her out any time.  All the accidents have happened when
someone was at home and available to her.  Instead of asking to go out,
she sneaks off into a carpeted room and goes there, sometimes peeing,
sometimes pooping.  We have a bell on our back door that Isaac rings when
he wants to go out.  We've tried to teach Nina to ring the bell to go out,
but she just won't do it, even for treats.  Other dogs we've had would paw
at the door, bark, nuzzle you, or do *something* to get your attention
when they needed to go out.  She just sneaks away and relieves herself
indoors.  We've tried to make the rule that she must be either outside, in
the basement where we have laminate flooring (she never goes on a hard
surface floor), or in a room with someone supervising her.  The problem is
that we sometimes get distracted while supervising, and its easy to think
she'll be ok for a few minutes because the accidents are infrequent and 
she usually is ok.  I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for us, other
than just to be more watchful, which we're already trying to do.  How can
we encourage her to get our attention when she needs to go out?

Thank you,

Jessica