Puppy pads: why I don't recommend them, and what to do instead

Every day at least three or four people call me with the same story. The dog has been home for months, everything else is going fine, the cues work, the walks happen, but he still only wants to relieve himself indoors. On the walk he just sniffs lamp posts, and then back home he calmly does his business on the floor. When I start asking how things went in the beginning, it turns out that for eighty to ninety per cent of these people the start was identical: the puppy was deliberately trained to go on puppy pads, and after that it simply never transferred to the garden.

I'm a dog trainer, and this article is about what I see in my daily work with clients. A few years ago, in one of my first videos, I put it very bluntly: no pads, they're the curse of the twenty-first century. That was, to put it mildly, a bit of an exaggeration. If the world were only black and white, only good and bad with nothing in between, living in it would probably be quite boring. So this time I'll try to say the same thing more precisely and with some nuance, because the problem isn't the pad itself. The problem is what you teach the dog with it.

In short

• A pad is not evil in itself. If you cover the whole house or a whole room with them to protect the floor, nothing terrible happens.
• The trouble starts when you deliberately train a puppy to pee on one particular pad and praise him for it.
• A puppy learns to go outside naturally, as long as you stay out of his way and give him enough opportunities.
• By praising him for going indoors, you kill his natural disgust for the smell, and that disgust is what the whole thing rests on.
• A dog has no idea the pad is special. To him it's just an object on the floor, exactly like your white rug or your sofa.

This is my opinion and my practice, not a universal prescription. I work with specific clients in specific situations, and what I'm describing is statistics from my own phone, not a study. You're free to agree or disagree, that's entirely your business. But if the problems do show up, don't say I didn't warn you.

When puppy pads actually do make sense

I can absolutely imagine situations where pads are useful. Say you have a fine wooden floor that's very sensitive to moisture, and a puppy moves in who is going to soak the whole thing in his first few weeks. If you cover the room or the house with pads simply to save the floor, there's nothing wrong with that at all. That's a flooring decision, not a training decision, and it deserves to be treated as one.

The difference between that and the problematic version is subtle but decisive. In one case the pad is just a surface that happens to be there when the puppy goes. In the other case the pad is a target: you carry the dog to it, hold him there, and then shower him with praise and treats. The first is a passive solution for your floor. The second is active training, and it's the one that later comes back to me as a phone call.

How a puppy learns to toilet outside on his own

To understand why pad training so often ends badly, you have to understand how a dog learns in the first place. Like a person, a dog goes through developmental stages, and in each stage there's something he needs to pick up. First walking, then communication, eating and so on. One of those items, and definitely not one of the earliest, is the toileting question. There comes a point when the puppy starts to work out that going where I sleep isn't really a great idea.

The important thing here is that this is not a trick you have to teach from scratch. It's an instinct that's already in him. Dogs are clean animals, and the older they get, the less they enjoy lying next to their own mess. That disgust is the engine that pushes a dog to get up, move away from his bed and do his business somewhere else. And if you don't interfere too much and simply give him the chance to do it outdoors, most dogs manage it perfectly well and there's no problem at all.

That's also why this topic is so unusual compared with the rest of my work. In most cases my job is to teach a dog something. Here my job is mostly to stay out of the way and not meddle where nature has already done the work.

Why training on pads causes problems

What I really dislike is the moment when owners start deliberately teaching a puppy to pee on pads. There are two reasons it backfires, and they work in parallel.

The disgust for the smell disappears

If you go against nature and try to convince the dog that look, it's not that bad, it doesn't smell, see, you weed and I stroked you and gave you a treat, so basically this is great, and when you smell that smell it means everything is fine, then over time the disgust simply never sets in.

A simple comparison. Ask a heavy smoker whether his coat smells of smoke and he'll tell you it doesn't. He's lived inside that smell long enough that he genuinely can't detect it any more. Exactly the same thing happens to a dog. A kind of immunity to the smell sets in, and that's the moment all the other problems begin. A dog with no disgust for his own smell no longer looks for a spot away from his bed. He has no reason to look.

The dog learns to toilet on objects

The second aspect, and in practice the more unpleasant one, is the pad as an object. To you it's something special: you bought it, you chose it, and you place it in a particular spot because it feels cleaner that way. To the dog it's a bit of rubbish on the floor. It carries no special status in his eyes whatsoever.

So if you teach a dog that objects are fair game, ask yourself how he's supposed to tell your pad apart from the white rug in your living room, or the white rug at the friends' house you've just walked into. Or the sofa. For a dog who has lost the disgust and has been taught to go on objects, that's a perfectly logical decision. And he will, and not only wee.

That's exactly why I don't like pads. Not because there's anything magically evil about them, but because they're most often used as a teaching aid, and then the dog learns two things that are very hard to unteach later.

What to do instead

The main idea is simple: don't teach your dog to relieve himself in any particular place indoors. If you want to teach a place, teach it outdoors. Outside you can absolutely train a specific spot, no objection there at all, but never indoors.

From that follows the second principle, the one people break most often with the best of intentions. Never praise a dog for going indoors. Not on the pad, not next to the pad, not because he at least made it to the right room. Every bit of praise for performing indoors is another brick in the wall you'll have to knock down later.

And equally important is what you must not do in the other direction. Under no circumstances punish a dog for an accident indoors. I've covered that separately, and it's a big enough subject that I won't try to compress it here. But to avoid any misunderstanding: the answer to this problem is not severity. The answer is to stop rewarding what you don't want, and to give the dog plenty of chances to do what you do want.

The most common mistakes

• Deliberately teaching a puppy to go on a specific pad, then wondering why he won't go outside.
• Praising and feeding the dog the moment he has finished going indoors.
• Confusing two different things: protecting your floor and toilet training.
• Punishing accidents indoors, which teaches the dog to hide rather than to choose the right place.
• Assuming the dog understands the difference between a puppy pad and every other soft thing in the house.

One last thought

If only one idea survives this whole article, let it be this one: before you teach a dog something, it's worth asking whether he can already do it. On the toileting question nature has done most of the work for you, and your greatest contribution may simply be not getting in the way. Most of the problems people call me about didn't come from laziness or indifference. They came from very diligent training in the wrong direction.

So agree with me or don't, that's your business entirely. But if the problems do start, at least you'll know where to look for the beginning of them.

This article is based on my video about puppy pads and on my daily work with clients. It reflects my experience and my opinion rather than a universal prescription, and it doesn't replace an individual consultation. It was translated from the Latvian original. If your dog suddenly starts relieving himself indoors after previously not doing so, or if the frequency changes, see a vet to rule out a health problem.