Toilet training a puppy in a flat, when there is no garden

Most advice about toilet training assumes you have a back door. If you live on the third floor, that advice is useless. By the time you have found the lead and got down two flights of stairs, the puppy has already gone.

First, the uncomfortable bit

An indoor toilet will slow down outdoor training. There is no way around this. You are teaching a puppy that going indoors is acceptable, and at some point you will have to un-teach it.

Anyone selling you an indoor toilet as a clean solution is being dishonest with you. It is a compromise. The only useful question is whether it is the right compromise for your situation, and often it is.

When it is the right compromise

• Your puppy is under twelve weeks and not fully vaccinated, so cannot be put down on ground other dogs use
• You are above the ground floor, and stairs or a lift make a fast exit impossible
• You are out for stretches longer than the puppy can physically hold
• Someone in the household cannot manage several trips outside a day

If none of those apply to you, skip the indoor toilet entirely. Take the puppy outside every single time. It is more work for a fortnight and considerably less work for the following year.

How long a puppy can actually hold it

The rough rule is one hour per month of age, plus one. Then add that they will need to go immediately after sleeping, eating, drinking or playing, regardless of when they last went.

Age	Roughly how often
8 weeks	Every 2 to 3 hours
12 weeks	Every 3 to 4 hours
16 weeks	Every 4 to 5 hours
6 months	Every 5 to 6 hours

Treat those as maximums, not targets. A puppy left to the limit of what it can hold is a puppy having an accident.

The routine that works

1. Pick one spot and never move it. Consistency is doing most of the work here.
2. Take them there at every trigger — waking, eating, drinking, playing, and on the clock in between.
3. Wait, and be boring. Do not talk to them, do not play. If it turns into a game they will not settle.
4. Praise the second they finish, not five seconds later. Dogs connect the reward to whatever they were doing at that exact moment.
5. Never tell them off for an accident. It does not teach them to stop. It teaches them to go somewhere you cannot see, which is a much harder problem.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Cleaning accidents with ordinary household cleaner. Most contain ammonia, and ammonia smells like urine to a dog. You have just marked the spot as a toilet.

Use an enzymatic pet cleaner. It breaks the proteins down rather than covering the smell. This one change fixes a surprising number of stubborn cases.

Pads, real turf, or a grass mat

Puppy pads are the cheapest and the worst habit-former. They feel like fabric, and puppies generalise. Bath mats, rugs and your coat all feel roughly the same underfoot.

Real turf works well and smells. It needs replacing every couple of weeks, which adds up over a year.

An artificial grass mat with a tray sits in between. The point is that it feels like nothing else in the flat, so there is no confusion about what is a toilet and what is a rug. It rinses off and drains into the tray underneath.

We sell one of these at £24.99. It is not magic. It is just a surface that will not teach your dog that soft things are acceptable.

Moving them outside

Once vaccinations are complete and they can go out properly:

• Move the mat gradually towards the door across a week
• Then put it just outside the door
• Then stop using it

Expect one or two regressions along the way. That is normal and not a sign it has failed.

When it is not a training problem

If a puppy that was getting there suddenly starts having accidents, or is straining, or going very frequently in small amounts, stop training and speak to your vet. Urinary infections are common in puppies and no amount of routine will fix one.