How To Paper Train Your Dog

Paper training is when you train your puppy to eliminate on paper inside of your floor. The paper training method works best if you are not going to be at home for long periods of time, a puppy cannot be asked to hold her bladder for more than 3 hours. Because of this, paper training might be your best choice. Keep in mind that paper training is not house training and can actually make it take longer to teach your puppy to eliminate outside. Paper training takes time and patience, but it is well worth the effort.

1. Select a good room to use that has linoleum or wood floor. Any place where it will be easy to clean up any mess that makes it to the floor. Often bathrooms are a good choice.

2. Confine the puppy to the selected room and lay paper down that covers about 1 quarter of the room. This paper should be thick enough to hold about ½ a cup of liquid without seeping onto the floor.You might want to put plastic down underneath the paper to protect your floor.
3. In this room you will want to have the puppy's bed, water, food and toys. You will want to give the puppy everything it needs to play by itself. Put the food, water, toys and bed as far away from the newspaper as possible. Puppies will naturally want to eliminate farthest away from their bed.
4. When you start this you will have to spend some time with the puppy in the room. Look for signs that your puppy needs to eliminate. These might include, sniffing the floor or walking in a circle. When you see these signs, bring the puppy to the newspaper. You should also bring the puppy to the newspaper after meals and play.
5. When you have the puppy on the newspaper, tell it to eliminate. You can use whatever wording you feel comfortable with, "go potty" or "go pee pee" are both common phrases. While at first your puppy will not know what you are saying, eventually she will be able to make an association between your words and what she is doing.
6. After your puppy eliminates, make sure to praise her. This will enforce what you are trying to get her to do. Puppies want to please you.
7. When cleaning up, take off the first few sheets of paper. Not removing all of the paper is important because the puppy will want to eliminate where it smells its own feces and urine.
8. After the puppy has success using the newspaper alone, you can try and leave him alone for short periods of time. If you have to go to work, try and come home at lunch to give your puppy some much needed attention.
9. If your puppy has an accident, don't punish him. Instead, spend more time anticipating when the puppy will need to eliminate and put him on the paper.
10. When you puppy is using the paper successfully, you can make the area of paper smaller. You can even move the puppy to another room.