Life With Dogs And Puppies Blog

#puppies #puppytraining — I noticed that there were quite a lot of puppy training pads at my local Petsmart store.  I personally never used any of these puppy pads but they are certainly cleaner than newspapers when house training puppies.

I think that they can be used in conjunction with dog litterboxes initially in order to help train a puppy to go into the box for elimination.  However, newspapers in the litterbox works just as well.

The puppy training pad are not cheap and they can be costly in the long run if one decides to train dogs inside like I have with my two lhasa apsos.  My two dogs are completely trained to use a dog litterbox indoors although they do go outside sometimes too.  I will have lots of information on training dogs to use litterboxes soon.

I also heard from some dog owners that their dogs have ripped up the puppy training pads for fun which causes a bit of a mess.  But puppies can also do this with newspapers too although newspapers are a lot cheaper!

The puppy training pads are suppose to attract the puppies to them for elimination.  Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.  I personally think that it’s just as easy to use dog litter and/or newspapers for this purpose.

I’ve trained all my dogs indoors.  My first two dogs were completely trained indoors on newspapers for life and they didn’t have training pads back then.  And when I got my new dogs five years ago, dog litterboxes came out and it was a natural move to use them.

So overall, I think puppy training pads are a good idea if you want to use something less potentially messy than newspapers since papers can mark up ceramic floors due to the print ink.  However, the puppy pads can be bypassed much like I did with my dogs.  You can easily use a combination of newspapers and dog litter at first while gradually training your puppy to use just the dog litter eventually.  This is the route I took and advocate.