This is exactly why I like my dogs to be used to being in a crate. It makes an already stressful situation less stressful for them.
My most wonderful dog ever, Roman, came to us with a neck injury. He’d spent the previous week at the SPCA. Turns out he’d spent a good bit of that time ramming his head against the crate door trying to get out. Hence, neck injury. When the vet told me that we’d have to confine him to a crate for a month for the injury to heal, I told her we’d have to come up with Plan B on that one. Fortunately he was just fine being confined to our kitchen/den area with a baby gate. I spent the next 4 years worried to death that he’d have to be crated at the vet’s sometime and do the same thing. Fortunately he never had to stay overnight, so the couple times he did have to go in for a procedure they put us in a room and I’d stay with him until he was awake enough to go home.
I don’t see anything wrong with crating a dog as long as it’s done properly. I have a Jack Russell Terrier and she is crated when we aren’t home and doing very well with it. At night I can just tell her it’s time for bed and she’ll run back to her crate and curl up on her little dog bed. I keep her food and water in there along with a couple chew toys and a rawhide bone. The only times I insist she be in her crate is when we’re asleep or when we’re not home. Any other time she is allowed to roam the house and backyard to her content.
We have a standard poodle. Not that big, as dogs go, but certainly big enough to jump any baby gate ever made. Putting him outside all day was out of the question. Not only is our yard next to a school, making him an obvious temptation, but given half a chance he’ll eat pine needles galore and wind up throwing up and bleeding out. Don’t say we can train him – he’s been doing it for 10 years.
He loves the crate. He goes in quite willingly when we have to leave, and in fact will often nudge the door open and lay down in there even when everyone is home. I don’t see that any other alternative (putting him in the garage, keeping him on a short leash in a corner of the yard) is any better for him.
Those who advocate leaving the dog outside in the back yard, say in a good old suburban neighbourhood, have obviously never owned a terrier.
My first dog, a cairn terrier, used to dig under fences and escape all the time. Dad tried the old chicken wire underground approach to stopping it, but she still managed to dig under THAT, too. That’s not counting the digging in the flowerbeds, the digging up the lawn…
Myes. Leaving her outside would have been a great way to turn our yard into a warzone
She did grow up, and she did stop digging… for the most part. Sometimes it just got the best of her and we’d find her, at 13, in a deep hole in the yard with just her little terrier tail sticking out, dirt flying everywhere.
My mum has an Airedale. A wacky, not bright, hyper dog. She spends the day inside with free run of the house.
When she was a pup there was the odd shoe eating, rubbish bin rumaging, pillow chewing, peeing moments. They didn’t last for long. She is now 4 years old and her biggest crime is messing up mums bed.
She does like a good dig though, that’s what the beach is for.
Crates-we still haven’t let Lexie have the run of the house yet! (Because she’s still chewing). Like Elenfair said, terriers (in our case, a Westie), are really stubborn little buggers who like nothing better than to dig holes-it’s been bred into them.
The ONLY time the crate has ever been used for “punishment” is when she gets so hyper that she can’t calm down and so we give her a “time out” for five minutes. But she loves her crate-she even goes in there for naps sometimes voluntarily. She has a bed and toys in there, and we drap a sheet over top so it’s nice and cool and dark. And at night we play a little radio for her while she’s sleeping.
In fact, not only does our dog like her crate, the cats have been known to climb into it on occassion! (One night Buffy accidentally got locked in there with her. Hilarity ensues).
I’ve read about crate training, and my brother and sil believe it is the only way to go and for them I think they are right.
We, on the other hand, have 2 dogs and 2 cats which have never seen the inside of a crate and probably never will. We have a midsized doggie door from the sunroom to the fenced back yard and all four critters come and go as they please.
We have no litter box for the cats, they go outside when they need to potty, same as the dogs.
Interestingly, we only have one food and water bowl put in a central location. All of the critters take turns to eat and drink. There’s a pecking order that goes along with how long each can hog the bowls, and they’ve worked this system out all by themselves.
They sleep wherever they want to inside the house. Sometimes with a child, sometimes on the couch … we don’t care and neither do they
