# Potty training - indoors



## learnfpga (Mar 11, 2019)

We welcomed a 10 week old puppy in our family last week. So far it is going really great. However, we are running into issues of training the dog indoors and I wanted to gain some insight from people's collective experience.


Set Up: The puppy is being crate trained and has a a connected play pen. In the play pen we have a litter box with pads and food. During the night we remove food and water and pen only consists of litter box with pad and not other room in the pen. Puppy has easy access to litter box but there is no exposed floor area.


So far every time we take puppy out he is religiously relieving himself. We had a few accidents initially but they were more because we were not able to follow a set routine for the first 2-3 days. After that he is been 90% consistent with outside.


However, after reading more we have realized that we should spend more time focusing on indoor training first and outdoor training would be much easier to achieve later.


This is where we are running into issues. To make sure he only uses the pad in the litter box we have confined the puppy in the crate with just enough area in the playpen to accommodate the litter box. But he struggles to go on the pad. last night he was miserable to go number 1 and 2 and it took us 2 hours of cajoling to get him to relieve himself in the litter box. This morning he did number 1 in his pad but then he did some more once we gave him some freedom after he had done number 1.


I think we are making progress but even after he relieves himself we are not confident that he will not go outside. how long can we keep him confined in his crate and pen when we know he desperately wants to go?


Another issue that happened this morning was we made playpen a little larger to accommodate food and water. He decided to relieve himself on the little exposed floor inside the playpen close to food but not in the litter box with pad. In the process he also contaminated his food. I thought the natural instinct is not to pee and poo in the area where they eat.


I think overall we have achieved consistency that he will not soil his crate and the fact that he will relieve himself once taken outside on the grass.


Please advise on how to proceed and feedback on things that we may be doing wrong.


Thanks in advance

Lf


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## EvaE1izabeth (Nov 14, 2017)

Oh that is tough because it’s confusing. I think aim sometimes takes a little time, mine had trouble with aim, just keep it small like you’ve been doing and clean it up as quickly as possible. I think he doesn’t want to go near his food and is probably stressed about it. Hopefully someone with more insight will have more specific advice! I was lucky that mine had some introduction to indoor potty training, there might be more that others can offer if you are starting from scratch. 

Is the food available all of the time or are you referring to the dishes that are there? If they’re empty anyway it can’t hurt to remove them.


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