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Dog Behavior: The Reasons Dogs Display Submissive Urination
The earlier in a pup's life an owner starts correcting the problem of submissive urination, the better off the dog will be. Most puppy owners are not aware of the underlying cause of this problem. Rather, they tend to feel their pup is displaying signs of cowardice and may not become a desirable adult dog. When the underlying reasons for the wetting are understood by the owner, correction may be accomplished in a few days to several weeks, depending on the strength of this tendency in the pup.
During the early neonatal period, a puppy's activities consist mainly of sleeping, blindly rooting around the litter group in search of the mother's milk, reflexive sucking for nourishment, and then being nuzzled onto its back and licked by the dam from top to bottom. The pup's unconditioned response to this licking is to urinate and defecate, allowing the dam to swallow the excreta and maintain litter sanitation.
The licking procedure occurs well before the puppy is capable of acquiring conditioned (learned) reflexes at a conscious level. However, at about the third and fourth week of life, there is an apparently conscious perception by the puppy that being turned over is a dominant behaviorism by the mother, and that assuming a belly-up position is an appropriate response to this approach.
Urination and/or defecation in these circumstances appears to be an acquired response on an emotional, rather than an intellectual, level of brain activity. When a solid food diet is introduced, the defecation response fades away, but submissive urination may persist longer.
Why submissive urination occurs more in females than in males is a matter for conjecture. One theory is that females have less of the hormones identified with dominant-aggressive behavior and are therefore more prone to submissive behavioral extremes than males. However, people have often seen the problem in mature males.
Because submissive urination occurs in response to dominant treatment, either by other animals or people, it tends to appear more often in submissive puppies than in dominant puppies. Originally the behavior filled a genuine physiologic need, that is, to evacuate so that proper internal and external health factors could be maintained. But if the behavior persists beyond this point, you can assume either that the pup is oversensitive to dominant stimulation, or that its submissive responses have been over-stimulated and the behavior has become ingrained on an emotional level. The term "emotional level" is appropriate here because a pup with this problem has no "conscious" awareness that it has urinated.
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