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How do I make my own "potty patch" and get my small dog to use it? Answered

I have a small pomchi and live in a very cold northern climate. We live in a main floor condo with access to green areas, but during the winter we get snowed in and he won't use the training pads he used as a puppy. My dog is over 5 years old now. I've seen the potty patch ads but can't get one in Canada. Please help!

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Hey guys! Its easy to make a Potty patch! I made a DIY potty patch with fake grass. You can find instructions here.
http://www.kymanddustinadventures.com/2011/11/diy-dog-potty-patch-fake-grass.html

Thank you all for your comments. I'll try a combination of litter box and fake grass and let you know how it goes.

I'm sure you could make one pretty easy since it's basically fake lawn, a "strainer", and a container.  There are tray-style cat litter boxes with sifter trays that could easily be modified, and you could slap on a piece of fake lawn.  To raise the sifter a bit off the ground, throw in some cat litter underneath it.

You'd have to teach the command "Go potty", painstakingly watch your dog, and keep returning him to the potty patch every time you see him about to poo/pee, so he learns what the command means and where to go.  Reward the desired behavior, ignore the bad.  There are more detailed instructions on how to teach a dog to pee/poo in a specific spot - this is common for people with yards who don't want pee/poo everywhere in the yard.  There are also directions on how to litter box train a dog which brings up the alternative solution

You can litter box train a dog if you don't want to make a potty patch and follow the same regime.  There are also "pee stakes" that are pee scented (very strong apparently) and help teach dogs to pee in a certain area.

I don't think I'd want a potty patch considering what the clean-up would involve.  I'd probably go with the litter box if I were to do it.
 

But if you bodged together a drain leading outside (sorta like a dryer vent, only with dog pee instead of hot air and lint), the cleanup would be a lot more reasonable, and you could just run a bit of soap or bleachwater through it occasionally to help with the smell. If you have outside drains for your rain gutters that you could route it to, even better. You'd still have to deal with the poo manually, but that's no different than what you'd do while out on a walk. Put a Diaper Genie next to the Potty Patch w/drain to collect the poo baggies, and it's almost pleasant. Almost.

Blech.  Swirling around soapy bleach water doesn't make something clean.  That's what my old roommates from undergrad thought until I scrubbed the bathroom tiles and showed them that the tiles were supposed to be white.

I'd much rather deal with litter than a pool of pee.
 

But then you could collect the pee and use it to make potassium nitrate for your questionably legal homemade fireworks.


Oh... sorry. That's a different thread.

Correction on grammar:

"You can litter box train a dog if you don't want to make a potty patch, and then you can follow the same regime as with the potty patch."
 

It's a tray with a rack to raise the "grass" to create a drainage area.  Then there is some "artificial grass" to cover it all.

You should beable to get artificial grass at the garden center  / hardware store.