Paper Training
Owning a small dog offers lots of advantages. One of these is that if you don't want to have to walk her outdoors, you can teach her to eliminate on papers indoors. To start, get full-sized newspapers (not tabloids) and a sixteen-square-foot wire-mesh exercise pen, available from dog supply catalogs or a pet shop. Place the pen on an easy-to-clean floor and line the bottom with newspapers opened flat out. For one week, keep your dog in the fully papered pen anytime you aren't supervising or exercising her. Then, put a bed in the pen and gradually reduce the papered portion to one fullsized newspaper, overlapping five sheets to ensure proper absorption.
Once she is pottying on the paper, open up the pen within a small room or hall. When she consistently soils on the paper, gradually give her access to the house, room by room, when you are able to supervise her. Shuttle her over to the papers if she attempts to go elsewhere. If she begins missing paper to any degree, follow the confinement and umbilical cording procedure described for outdoor training, except take the dog to the paper rather than outdoors to eliminate.
Once trained, some paper-trained dogs only go on their papers; others prefer the outdoors but will use papers if necessary. You can paper-train a previously outdoor-trained dog and vice versa, but you'll avoid extra work by deciding what you want up front.
Crate Soiling
Although dogs normally won't mess in their crates, some do. Occasional accidents shouldn't concern you, but if it happens every other day or more, try these suggestions:
Remove all bedding in hopes he'll be repulsed by having nothing other than his body to absorb the mess.
Use a smaller crate so he only has enough room to turn in place.
Teach him to enter and exit his crate on command.
Put his food and water in the open crate to encourage a better association about being in there; remove it when he's enclosed.
Identify and halt rituals that precede soiling. Barring physical problems, crate soiling is always preceded by a ritual such as whining, barking, pawing, digging, chewing on bars, or circling, turning, sitting, standing, or lying down repeatedly.
To correct these rituals as soon as they begin, confine your dog when you are home. Stop noisemaking (barking, howling, or whining) and destructive behavior (chewing, digging, or pawing) by using a leash tug or shaker can. By concentrating on the most pronounced behavior first — barking before whining or chewing before pawing — you'll find that minor noisemaking and destructive behaviors will decrease, too. As a result, the dog will relax, rest, and not soil.
