Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Crate Training For Your Doggie?

I discussed about Crate Training at my last post, lets talk about the benefits of Crate Training today.

When I got my first puppy, Tymmie, I was not too sure how to train him. He was a little Maltiese and was as cute as a button. That made it even harder to try to discipline him. My friend, who has owned several dogs, suggested crating. When he mentioned this training tool, I was not too sure what crating was, but I did know that I did not want to do anything cruel to my little puppy.

When I first read about crating, I had some trouble with it. For one thing, putting Tymmie in a box sounded mean. For another thing, I was not entirely sure that it would work. But, thanks to a little more prodding from my friend, and a few more accidents around the house, (YUCK!), I decided that it would certainly be a good idea to give crating a try.

I bought Tymmie a crate that was just the right size. He was able to stand up and turn around in the crate, and was able to get very comfortable. But, it was not long enough to allow him to use one end as his bathroom and the other end as his bedroom. In short, it became a perfect den for him.

Within a week or two, Tymmie was going to his crate alone to rest, sleep and made it as his home. It was so cute to see that Tymmie would put himself to bed at 8:00pm! He would hop along to his crate, make himself all comfy, chew for a few minutes on his bone, and be in dream land with 20 minutes.

The crate is a perfect den, because the owner can move it, it does not take up too much space, and the pup gets very comfortable with the crate as his or her home within a home.

By placing Tymmie in the crate whenever I would not be around to supervise his behavior, I was able to make sure that he did not get away with anything or hurt himself. This correction is important because if your puppy misbehaves and you are not there to discipline him immediately, he or she will not know what they did was wrong.

When Tymmie was outside of the crate, I was always watching him and monitoring his behavior. I was able to discipline him immediately; I was able to catch him red pawed!

There were some things I had to do to make the crate a comfortable environment for Tymmie and to make sure that the crating method of training worked.

· Cleaning the crate often to allow comfort

· Cleaning with natural products like Nature’s Miracle

· Taking the puppy out often enough that he was never forced to use the crate as a restroom
· Sticking to a schedule and keeping track of the amount of hours between the last time the pup went out.

It was also a challenge to make sure that I never used the crate as punishment, because it was important that Tymmie did not look at the crate as a negative view.

Doing all of these things helped me turn Tymmie into a well adjusted housebroken pup. As he grew older, I made sure to put him in the crate every once in a while so that he would always be accustomed to it. That way, when we traveled, he was comfortable and relaxed in the crate.

That's all for today, folk. Shall discuss about other common training method at my next posting.

Ciao.

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