First of all welcome to YT.
Crate training is the most preferred method of eliminating pee/poop when you are not actively supervising the dog. However, if your dog was born or grew up in an environment that it was forced to pee/poop in his/her kennel then you are working in a whole new situation. Potty training a dog that is used to soiling their own bedding and crate surroundings is going to be a challenge. This is why we strongly suggest avoiding pet store or puppy mill dogs or even backyard breeding (not saying your puppy is one, just educating general public too). Dogs that are forced to pee/poo in their bed/crate are harder to train because the instint to never eliminate on themselves or their bedding is GONE. Now you have to back track and help them learn that it's not fun to soil their surroundings.
The best thing I can advise is to try to put a gate up in your bathroom or kitchen so that the pup is on a tiled surface and not carpets. Cover the entire floor in pee pads either washable (Tbumpkins and Co. 107Barney) or disposable. As the puppy learns to use those pads to potty on you eventually start to remove one pad at a time until the pup learns to go on only that last pad left. This teaches that at night when you are sleeping that the puppy has a place that is appropriate to pee/poop rather than the floor.
The other option is to sleep with your puppy in your bed. You will always know when they have to go potty because they will wake you up when they are awake. Puppy will be more relaxed at night sleeping right beside you and will usually wake you up to go. We also use a bell by our bedroom door and by our backdoor that our dogs learned to ring when they need outside. My dogs will sleep through an entire night with rare potty breaks, but when they do need one they jump down off the bed, which we wake up and hear them, and sometimes ring the bell to go outside in the night. I learned early on that Bentley would poop in his crate and roll in it. He had seperation anxiety and wouldn't sleep alone. We gave in and he now sleeps with us in bed and has never had a night accident since. He's more relaxed to sleep with us than alone in a cold crate. Also he whined all night long befoer and now he doesn't.
For the whining if you decide to use the kitchen/bathroom gating thing with pee pads, you will just have to grow thick skin and not give into the whining. After a few nights the whining should stop. How old is the baby? Baby dogs are like baby humans. They will sometimes have to cry themselves to sleep. I am a push over dog mommy that lets my dogs in bed with me because it's hard to resist those whines, but some mom's have to get tough and go a week or more without sleep while they get the new baby pup used to sleepign on it's own away from momma.
hope some of that makes sense and helps. |