Decisions, decisions, decisions...

You have some decisions to make as you plan your toilet zone.

How big are your puppies at send home age?
How many puppies are in your litter?
What type of box do you want to use?
What type of substrate do you want to use?
Placement within the whelping box, then weaning pen.
Proximity to an exterior door.

1️⃣ Size of the puppies at send home age.

The first decision you will need to make will be when you install the first litter pans. Remember, we started around 14 days with a washable potty pad area in our whelping box, when we move our puppies to the weaning pen it’s time to install the first formal toilet area to handle the needs of our growing puppies. We do this gradually over a day.

The size of your puppy when it leaves your care will represent the biggest size puppy, and the greatest toilet needs, you will have. So it’s best to consider this size puppy, and the volume of urine and feces it produces, early on. This means we don’t find our toilet area too small to accommodate our puppies needs a week before they go home. That can lead to more urine and feces outside the box, right when our puppies are going a LOT.

Each litter pan you choose, in this modular system, should easily hold a puppy of send home age. For my GSD puppies, I can expect a 9 week old puppy to be 15 pounds and my 24 inch litter pan is JUST barely big enough for one puppy to fit inside comfortably to void. What type of box you use is a personal choice, I prefer rabbit litter pans, for their size, but I also sometimes use jumbo size cat litter boxes. Be sure the sides are low enough your puppies can get in/out easily, but high enough to hold substrate inside to reduce scatter. For ease of cleaning I prefer multiple smaller boxes, instead of one very large one, but either is fine.

*If the pan is too small, the puppy will be able to get its front end inside but the “business end” will be outside the toilet.

2️⃣ How many puppies are in the litter.

Puppies will not “wait in line” to potty, they simply do not have enough bladder and bowel control to wait, so we need our toilet are to be large enough that when a puppy realizes it need to void it can get to the box and have enough room to potty.

Plan to have 1 litter tray for each 3 puppies in your litter.
Each litter tray can hold a single large puppy (send home age) or a couple smaller puppies (4 to 5 weeks) easily.

3️⃣ What type of litter box do you want to use?

You have lots of choices for how you construct your toilet area. You can use the commercially available dog litterboxes, you can simply block off the end of your box with a board, or you can use a modular system made up of pans.

🧐 This is where size is a huge factor. Very tiny toy breeds may be too small for the higher lip of some litter boxes and be hesitant to enter, something like a boot tray, or jelly roll pan, might be right sized. On the other end, if you have a giant breed you may find that you need a larger pan with a taller lip, to hold the litter inside.

🦸🏻‍♀️ Here is what we have found works well for our puppies.

Our weaning pen is a rectangle (longer than wide) we set up our toilet on one narrow side of the pen (the east wall). For my area the narrow side is 6 feet wide (made up of 3 ex-pen panels) and this is where I set up my toilet.

From the start my toilet is going to span this wall. I will use three 24 inch square rabbit hutch pans to span this area.

Why did I choose rabbit hutch pans? Easy, these pans are the perfect depth, they are deep enough to hold litter inside, but not so deep my puppies can’t easily walk in. The size also worked great, because each pan is 24 inches, exactly the same width as my x pen panels. And because it’s a 24 inch square, it will hold one puppy of send home age nicely. Also, I can easily dump the pan (they fit right inside a garden size trash bag) and sanitize. I have tried many other options, but this works great for me. You may decide on something that works better for you. 🙂

⚠️ Full disclosure, I start with three 24 x 24 inch hutch pans, but for a large litter, or if I end up holding puppies back to 10 weeks or older, I remove the 3 24 x 24 inch pans and replace them with two bigger pans (30 x 36) to give my puppies a bit larger potty area.

I like this flexibility because during the dirtiest weeks (right before send home) I can use a bigger system, or if my litter is really large (10 or more puppies) or going home later than typical (over 10 weeks), and I’ve even use the largest system during a blizzard when puppies and dogs could not go outside at all!

So, as I breed every year, I keep three smaller pans (24 x 24) and two larger pans (30 x 36) that I use to make my potty area larger or smaller based on litter and puppy size.

⚠️If you breed infrequently, you may not want to invest in 5 pans. Just remember to use the guidelines above (pan size = puppy at send home size, and one pan of that size for each 2 or 3 puppies). Another option is to use a board to define your toilet area, this allow you to expand it as needed.

🤓Remember to factor in:

Size of your puppies, number of puppies, how low does the lip need to be to allow the puppies easy in and out, how does the width work with your pen panels, how easy to clean will they be?

These pans are easy to adapt to puppies of most sizes!

⚠️There are two primary drawbacks.

Because I use 3 pans, there is a seam between pans, so of course, puppies often void right on this seam. I put a disposable pad under each seam!
The lower sides means that some litter is pushed out. Higher sides would prevent this.
Storage: Pans must be stored between litters which I don’t like because storage space is at a premium in my world. A more storage effective option is to use a board or four to make a “box” for a toilet, then disassemble and store or discard the used wood.

Remember, you can use any type and size of pan that fits your space. My primary suggestion is that you choose a system that allows you to expand the size of the toilet if needed, and that is large enough to fit multiple puppies all going potty at the same time (such as after meals) or all night long.

🦸🏻‍♀️The Super Toilet

I figured this trick out when I had a really large litter of 12 puppies and around 7 weeks they would try really hard to void only in their litter box. However, we were not able to keep it scooped over night as we slept. Litter box puppies are very clean and don’t want to step in feces, so, I would wake up to find a litter box full of poop but also some poop in front of the full litter box. So, I started adding the three small pans only at night, when I woke up ALL the mess was in the litter box (YAY) and I would just clean, stack up, and set aside the smaller pans for the next nights use. This really helped keep the pen clean overnight, even with a very large litter of puppies.

📌 When you choose a modular system, with different size pans you can change around, it makes it very easy to adapt the size of your toilet to meet the needs of your litter.

📌Remember, the location and design of the toilet can make it easier for your puppies to find and use, or harder. And lack of use will lead to the habit of voiding elsewhere.

📌The design of the toilet can also make it more or less time consuming to clean your pen and change the box.

🧐While it doesn’t really matter what you make your litter box out of, here are some things that we, or our students, have tried that proved problematic.

❌ Kiddy Pool. My first experiment with a litter box was a kiddy pool but there were several drawbacks that really bothered me, and a few other misses along the way. The round shape meant if I placed the pool in the back of the pen, there were spaces at the corners, because the pen is square and the pool round. Puppies would play behind there, poop and pee would end up back there, and I chafed at the wasted space. The pool was also really heavy when full of shavings, it was very awkward to clean out, and I often ended up spilling the contents as I cleaned. I had to cut a door in the side as well, and shavings spilled out of this.

❗️Plastic Airline Crate bottoms - these were too heavy to clean easily and too small for my needs.

❗️Boot Trays - for many breeds these are too small and not deep enough. They are often not square, so again, there is wasted space, and empty corners to encourage play. For some very small breeds however, they can work very well.

❗ Anything made out of absorbent materials, such as cardboard.

❗️Metal trays with sharp corners or edges, these can injure puppies, they are heavy, and can be difficult to clean for that reason.

🤓So..... think, then plan, then build.

Toilet Zone: A Little Planning Now Will Save You A Lot Of Work Later.