How to Teach a Small Dog to Use a Cat Litter Pan

Video Transcript

"I'm Nancy Frensley. I'm the training manager at Berkeley East Bay Humane Society, in Berkeley, California. A lot of people who live in cities, and in apartments, and in high rises have small dogs, and because there's such a distance between where they live and the outdoors the dogs actually need to learn to use a doggy litter pan. Today, there are a number of commercial litter pans and litters on the market, but in general you'll want to have a plastic tub that is big enough for your dog to stand in and turn around in, and instead of a cat litter you might want to use turf. The reason for using turf, or the grass that you buy at the garden stores, the reason that you might want to use that is that dogs develop a substrate preference, or a surface preference for eliminating, and that's how how house training works. Dogs that have a preference for outdoor surfaces tend to want to go to out outdoor surfaces, and not to soil on surfaces that are not outdoors. So, when you set up your litter pan if your dog has a preference for grassy surfaces you can line your litter pan with a little bit of plastic sheeting, and then put in a couple of squares of turf, and your dog will probably gravitate or orient toward that surface. And you just have to show them where it is and take them to it each and every time you take them to potty. So, you'll want to experiment a little bit I think with your size of your litter pan, and with the different surfaces that you can put in. But small dogs can be successfully taught to use a litter pan instead of going outdoors, and that may be helpful if you live in a high-rise."