All dogs have a strong instinct not to soil their sleeping area, whether it be a den, a crate or a comfy bed. This is what makes it possible to housetrain our dogs - the trick is to teach them that the concept of "sleeping area" includes the entire indoor space.
This can start quite early. The main thing is to keep the puppies and their area as clean as possible. As you might expect, puppies who have to live in filth quickly lose the impulse to keep their sleeping area clean.
The first evidence of this behavior starts very early, before the puppies' eyes are even open. As soon as they are able to void their bladder and bowels independently, after nursing they will turn and toddle a few inches away to relieve themselves. At this age the mother is still cleaning them, but sometimes she has to stretch a bit to reach them!
At this point we can put a pee pad of some sort a few inches away from the mom. This makes it easier to clean up anything the mother dog misses.
After the pups' eyes open and they start walking better, we put out more pee pads. Since we planned to use pine shavings for our litter boxes, at this time we sprinkled a few shavings on the pee pads to get the puppies accustomed to the smell and feel of them.
The next step is some sort of container for the shavings. At first, something like a crate pan works very well. The main thing is the litter pan/area needs to be very, very easily accessible to the pups, and also close enough that when they are toddling away to potty they "accidentally" find themselves in it.
As the pups get more mobile, the litter area can be moved a little farther away.
We then started using plastic wading pools for the litter boxes - one side cut down so the pups can easily get in, but the sides of the pool really help contain the litter.
Here they have 2 crate pans with shavings nearly surrounding their sleeping area - "next door"
is a play area with another litter box.
The pups are now 5 1/2 weeks old, and are almost 100% consistent with using the litter boxes! Since this is such a big litter, they have 2 potty areas, at either end of their play area. Their sleeping areas area still near the litter boxes, since the first thing they have to do when the wake up is pee.
The next step will be to start getting them used to sleeping in crates, and going potty outside! More on that later.
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