I've Fostered 47 Dogs. Meet the 5 That Taught Me Everything I'd Gotten Wrong About House Training

I've Fostered 47 Dogs. Meet the 5 That Taught Me Everything I'd Gotten Wrong About House Training.

by Jordan Calloway
Certified rescue volunteer helping difficult shelter dogs successfully transition into safe, loving forever homes for families.

Dog No. 1

Biscuit

The dog who made me throw out everything I’d learned.

After nine years and almost four dozen foster dogs, I’ve made just about every mistake there is to make.

I’ve been confident. I’ve been humbled. I’ve cleaned up more accidents than I can count.

I used to think house training was about discipline and consistency.

Then a few special dogs came along and completely dismantled everything I thought I knew.

These are their stories.

Biscuit was my 11th foster. By that point, I had a system.

Scheduled outside trips every two hours. Crate at night when they were old enough. Positive reinforcement the moment they went in the right place. I’d cared for 10 different dogs in that apartment without a single complaint from my landlord.

Then Biscuit arrived.

He wasn’t destructive. He wasn’t anxious. He was calm, sweet, and completely unbothered by the crate. He followed my schedule without complaint.

And he had accidents constantly.

Not out of stress. Not out of defiance. He’d walk right past the pad, find a spot two feet away, and go there. Every time. With total confidence, like he’d decided that was simply his spot and that was that.

I tried moving the pad to his spot. He moved six inches to the left.

I tried three pads arranged in a triangle around the area. He found the gap.

I was baffled. I started asking other fosters. Most of them had a version of the same story one dog who just didn’t respond to what had always worked before.

“The pad doesn’t mean anything to him. There’s nothing on it that says bathroom. You’re asking him to make a choice, but you haven’t given him a reason.”

— A fellow foster parent

What I learned: Dogs don’t generalize the way we think they do. Biscuit wasn’t ignoring the pad. He genuinely had no signal telling him that object on the floor had anything to do with where he was supposed to go. The communication gap was the issue.

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Dog No. 2

Rosie

The most stubborn dog I’ve ever met. And the one I never fully figured out.

I got the warning before Rosie even arrived.

“She’s a sweetheart,” her previous foster told me. “But she has strong opinions. Best of luck.”

That was an understatement.

Rosie was a four-year-old beagle mix with the energy of a puppy and the stubbornness of a mule. She wasn’t anxious, she wasn’t confused — she was just utterly unimpressed by every pad I put in front of her. She’d sniff it, look up at me like I’d personally offended her, and walk away.

I tried three different brands of disposable pads. I tried the attractant spray. I tried moving the pad to every corner of the apartment. Rosie had zero interest in any of it.

She wasn’t a disaster. She learned to go outside reliably enough that I could manage. But she never took to a pad, and I always felt like I was working around the problem rather than solving it.

When she got adopted, I was genuinely happy for her — and quietly relieved. She’d exposed a gap in my toolkit that I didn’t have an answer for yet.

What I learned: Some dogs seem to be waiting for a signal I didn’t know how to give yet.

Dog No. 3

Duke

The dog who was “fixed” in one home and a disaster in mine...until I found the solution that revolutionized my fostering.

Duke came with a glowing report from his previous foster family.

“Fully house trained,” the notes said. “No accidents in three months. Knows exactly what to do.”

He had three accidents on his first day with me. I called his previous foster, genuinely confused.

She was equally confused. “He was perfect,” she kept saying. “I don’t understand.”

Here’s what we eventually figured out: Duke hadn’t learned general house training. He’d learned HER house.

He knew her specific outdoor route. He knew her schedule. He knew the layout of her apartment and exactly where his spot was. When all of that disappeared and he landed somewhere new and unfamiliar, every cue he’d been relying on vanished with it.

This is one of the most challenging situations in rescue fostering. A dog can look completely trained and fall apart the moment the environment changes — because the training was always situational. The dog learned context, not concept.

Everything changed for Duke once I added a NovaPaw Pup Pad to his environment.

A gray quilted pad with a repeating pattern of white dog bones on a white background.

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Pheromone-Infused

Machine Washable

Won't Fade Over Time

Pheromone-Infused

Machine Washable

Won't Fade Over Time

It didn’t matter that my apartment looked nothing like his last foster home. The scent was the same. The cue was the same.

Within two days, he’d found his footing.

What I learned: If a dog is “trained” but struggles every time something changes, they may have learned habits rather than understanding. A scent-based signal travels with the dog in a way that environmental cues never can.

Dog No. 4

Gertie

The 13-year-old who made me feel like a beginner again.

Gertie was the oldest dog I’ve ever fostered. Thirteen years old, arthritis in both back legs, and a bladder that had started giving her less and less warning.

Her owner had passed away. Gertie had no idea why everything in her life had suddenly changed. And she was having accidents she clearly didn’t intend to have she’d look down afterward with an expression that broke my heart every time.

I wasn’t prepared for how different senior dog fostering is.

Everything I knew about house training assumed a dog with better physical control and the ability to learn new patterns quickly. Gertie had neither. She couldn’t always make it to the door. She couldn’t always make it to the pad. And retraining a 13-year-old dog who’d been perfectly reliable her whole life felt both ineffective and unkind.

What she needed wasn’t training. She needed proximity and instinct.

I put NovaPaw Pup Pads in multiple spots near her bed, near the door, near the couch where she liked to sleep. The pheromone signal gave her nose a target to orient toward even when her body didn’t give her much time to get there.

It wasn’t perfect. But the accidents dropped dramatically. And more than that, she stopped looking confused and ashamed afterward. She was finding her spot. She had somewhere to go.

What I learned: Senior dogs don’t need more training. They need better infrastructure. A strong scent signal can do a lot of what a weakening body can no longer do on its own.

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Dog No. 5

Pogo

The dog who finally made everything click and what I wish I’d known on day one.

By foster number 38, I thought I’d seen everything.

Then I got a young border collie mix—smart, eager, easy. The kind of dog that makes you feel like a genius.

I used the pheromone pad out of habit by then. Pogo took to it immediately, same as almost all dogs do.

And something about watching it happen so simply, so quickly, made me think back through all 37 dogs before him.

How many of them had I overcomplicated in the early days, before I found the NovaPaw Pup Pad? How many times had I defaulted to tactics that put the burden of understanding entirely on the dog, when the real gap was that I hadn’t given them anything clear to respond to?

I’d spent years believing that consistency and repetition were the whole equation. And they matter. But they’re only half the equation. The other half is signal giving a dog’s nose something unambiguous to follow, something that doesn’t require learning or generalization or luck.

I can’t go back and re-foster the dogs who struggled longer than they needed to. But I think about them when new fosters ask me what I’d do differently.

The answer is simple: start with the signal. Everything else gets easier from there.

I can't recommend the NovaPaw Pup Pad enough. Pheromone technology is embedded during manufacturing and doesn’t fade not after washing, not over time. If your dog has been missing the pad, ignoring it, or struggling despite your best efforts, it probably isn’t a training problem.