When we adopted Darwin a couple of months ago (at age 11 months) he was pretty much house trained. By now, he's very goood, and poops regularly when we take him out for a walk, so that he never has accidents in the house. I stress "accidents", because it seems that the only problem that we have with him he does on purpose.

Whenever he gets the chance, he sneaks into the bedroom of our two daughters to poop. I've tried cleaning it with bleach and everything else so he doesn't associate the smell, but he already knows the way there without smelling it. It's nothing to do with having to go - he'll do it straight after he gets back from a walk if he wants to. Is it a kind of dominance thing - "I can poop where I want and there's nothing you can do about it"?

We try to keep the door of their room closed, but their bedroom is also our bomb shelter, so it has a heavy steel door with a rubber seal, and it's hard enough for adults to close, let along 6 and 8 year olds. He waits until someone hasn't closed it properly and then slips inside.

What can we do??

I would start with teaching him that room is off limits. As a general rule, my dogs are never allowed into childrens' rooms, ever. If you don't have an e-collar yet, this would be a great time to invest in one as you can remotely correct the behavior. You can sort of set him up to show him he cannot go into that room by walking in when he is close by and waiting to see if he follows. At this point, I have blocked the dog from progressing further into the room while calmly saying some sort of correction (I use a sort of "ah" sound lol). When I say blocking, what I do is step forward towards the door to prevent the dog getting in further and "block" with my body - squared off facing the dog. The dog will usually back up and I step back, ready to repeat if necessary. At this point, once the dog understands that the room is off limits I start physically correcting (as opposed to marking with a verbal correction) when they try to cross the threshold (using the e-collar). Between tethering the dog to you and crating when you can't supervise, the dog should have limited access to that room overall, and you should be able to teach him to not go in with a little work.