Pets – Scoop Central

Crate training is widely agreed by dog owners to be the best technique to house train a puppy. You will need a crate when crate training your puppy. You can’t keep an eye on your puppy all the time, so you need to confine her activity to an alloted space for a short period of time. Your puppy should stay in the crate except for when she’s playing under your supervision, eating, or going outdoor with you for a potty break.

The crate is like your puppy’s den, a place where your puppy feels safe and at ease; it’s her private place where she comfortably sleeps, takes naps, or idles her time away. Dogs naturally like to keep their sleeping or resting area clean, so your puppy will not like to soil her den. She will try to keep her pee and poop in until you let her out of her crate.

Choosing a crate

Choosing the right size of crate for your puppy is very importantI. If the crate is too large, your puppy will comfortably use one end as her sleeping area, and the other end as her toilet. This actually destruct the primary objective of puppy crate training, and certainly will impede the house training process for a few weeks!

With regard to choosing the crate, choose one crate that’s large enough for your puppy to comfortably stand up, turn around, and lie down. No worries though, there’s no need to keep buying new crates when your puppy gets bigger. If you can buy just only one crate and use it until even your puppy gets bigger, you’ll save a lot of money in the long term.

Buy an adult-size wire crate and partition the inside space with dividers while your dog is a puppy. You can use a wire grille or board as divider. As and when your puppy requires a larger area to move around as she grows, you can remove the dividers to give more space to her. If you like, you could make a crate yourself, then replace it with a bigger one as your puppy grows.

Making the crate welcoming

You can make the crate a welcoming and inviting place for your puppy to go. It’s a good idea to lay a couple of towels on the floor of the crate, not forgetting to put a chew and some toys inside the crate as well. The crate entrance should be invitingly open at all times, but should be securely closed when your puppy is inside.

Remember: before your puppy is fully house broken, you wouldn’t want to give her total freedom in the house to avoid soiling incidence. If you let her to move around in every corner of the house before she’s completely house trained, you’re actually encouraging her to eliminate wherever she likes. Each time she does this, it’ll be easier for her to repeat her action.

Where to put the crate?

During crate training, you would want to keep your puppy’s crate close you. The most suitable place to put the crate is where the family members gather, for example the kitchen. With your puppy in the crate close to you, you’ll find that the house breaking your puppy process is easier, as you can keep tabs of your puppy every moment. In addition, it helps foster the connection between you and your pooch. Your puppy needs to feel that she’s a part of the family now, and that she’s not isolated from everyone.