As I said in my previous blog, we had a lot of problems with Sprite until her first birthday. You would never guess now…. since she is such a loving, wonderful pet.
Since she had lived in a crate for the first three months of her life, she didn’t know what was expected of her when we put her in her crate here at home. My daughter and I (along with Sprite!) took a puppy-training class at a local dog boarding place, where we were told to just crate her, and since she was a dog, she would know not to mess her “den” (crate.) It didn’t matter how I posed the problem of Sprite “messing herself” in her crate, I was told time after time (by the puppy-trainer teacher) to just crate her, and that her “dog instincts” would dictate that she not use her crate as a bathroom.
It was very frustrating to come home and find that Sprite would not only mess herself, but, since she did have some type of dog instincts, she would then turn around in her crate and push everything out of the crate into the kitchen. This happened several times, and of course, the only person who could clean up the mess was …. ME!
To make a long story short, I figured out that if we let Sprite have the run of the kitchen, she would still mess in the kitchen, but she wouldn’t try to push it all out of that “den” area. I much preferred cleaning a little dollop here and there than a huge mess everywhere. So, that was the end of our crating experience.
As for our puppy-training class…. I was very disappointed with their inability to deal with dogs that didn’t fall into the norm. So, that was the end of that!
pet house crate,
