If you can confine them to a small area of the house close to where they sleep and eat, it is more likely they won't soil there and will wait until they are taken to the area where they are supposed to go. If you are gone 8 hours tho, you may have to rig up a room, say the kitchen, for them to eat on one end and put the potty pad as far away from the food as you can get it, so they can use the potty pad. The potty pads are prescented so that they are attracted to go there anyway.
We also learned that they like to go when the pad is clean, not when it is full of their waste, so it's best to keep a clean pad in there. We change ours daily and it works much better that way. And apparently, in our case at least, our puppy does not like to go poo where she has peed. So we change the pad more often for that reason as well. We usually change it just before she is due to go poo and she seems to have no problem going there in that case, whereas, she resists going there if the pad is saturated with pee.
You want to make sure you try to get her to go on the pad or outside right after a nap, or in the a.m. after waking up, and after play or exercise or eating. The best thing to do is to feed them their "formal" meals on schedule. So we do this by feeding soft food at scheduled times during the day. Our puppy also nibbles on kibble throughout the day (you should always keep kibbles around whether you feed on schedule or not), but she usually only goes poo after eating her soft food meal. Her poo schedule seems to be twice a day. Once in the morning when she wakes up, and then in the evening, so twice a day.
The key is keeping them confined and feeding them "formal" meals on schedule. And when you are home, you may want to do what we do, we keep our puppy leashed to us with her extending leash so that she has no opportunity to sneak off and do her business. |