The bells, I hear the bells!
A few weeks prior to the arrival of Phoebe's second litter I'd heard about 'bell training' (and had to ask what it was - it's where the dog is trained to ring a bell placed near the door when it needs to eliminate). I thought it was a neat idea, and when I googled I discovered it seems to be the current 'in thing' for toilet training pups in the USA. So, when it became obvious that my dog had no effective means to indicate her need to go, I quickly consulted Google again and formulated a plan:
Find a suitable and affordable bell. We couldn't readily purchase a 'tell bell' here and we were concerned that the sleigh bell style would be too quiet. We settled on a set of wind chimes with a good sized disc for dog noses to hit.
Stick the black and white paper target to the disc hanging as the ringer from the wind chimes and hang the chimes by the back door with the disc and nose height (our dogs are already trained to nose touch this target).
Train the dogs to 'ring it'. We started with the familar command 'touch' and clicked and treated when the nose touch made the chimes sound. We quickly replaced the verbal cue with 'ring it!', then removed the paper target.
Ask the dogs to 'ring it' before opening the door ever time they were going out.
Stop automatically sending them out to toilet at regular intervals and wait for the usual symptoms of urgency, then rush to the back door and give the cue 'ring it!', then open the door (as the reward for having rung the chimes).
Phoebe learned to ring her 'bell' in under a day (because she already knew to nose-touch her target - this is why seemingly meaningless foundation 'tricks' and skills are so important) and within a week she was using the bell to summon humans to open the door.
4 weeks on and Phoebe thinks it's just BRILLIANT that she can summon the human 'staff' in the middle of the night so she can pop out for a moonlight mooch in the yard and get a quick pat on the way back to bed if she's bored or lonely. She has started 'nuisance ringing' where she will ring the bell multiple times per hour in the early hours. I will now let her out twice in short succession, then I tie the bell up so she can't ring it for fun and attention.
Here's some pictures of our 'bell' and the girls using it.