Crate training without the guilt

People arrive at crate training either convinced it is essential or convinced it is cruel. Both positions miss the same point: a crate is a den the dog chooses to use, and whether it is that or a box you shut a distressed animal into depends entirely on the first fortnight.

Why bother

A dog that is comfortable in a crate is easier to keep safe. It has somewhere to go when the house is full of people. It can travel. It can be confined after surgery without the confinement itself becoming a trauma. And crate rest after an injury is, for many dogs, the difference between healing and not.

If you never need any of that, you never need a crate. Plenty of dogs live perfectly well without one.

Sizing it

Big enough to stand up, turn round and lie flat out on their side. For a puppy, buy the adult size with a divider, and move the divider as they grow. Too big too early and a puppy will use one end as a toilet, which teaches exactly the wrong thing.

The first week, properly

Do not shut the door. Not once, all week.

1. Put the crate somewhere the family is - a corner of the living room, not the utility.
2. Take the door off or fasten it open. Put bedding in, and something that smells of the litter.
3. Feed every meal in it, at first just inside the doorway, then further back over a few days.
4. Scatter a few treats in it through the day so finding something good in there becomes normal.
5. When the puppy goes in voluntarily and lies down, you are getting somewhere.

The second week

Close the door for three seconds while they are eating, and open it before they notice. Then ten. Then thirty. Sit next to it. Build up over days, not hours, and always open the door before they ask you to.

Then start leaving the room for a few seconds while the door is closed, and come back before they are worried. This is the same skill as being left alone, and you are training both at once.

The rules that make it work

• Never use it as punishment. One angry shove and you have undone a fortnight.
• Never ignore genuine distress. Frantic barking, drooling, scrabbling at the door and panting are not "settling"; they are panic, and letting it run makes it worse. Go back a step.
• Never leave a puppy crated longer than it can hold on. Roughly one hour per month of age, up to about four hours, and never four hours routinely.
• Take the collar off before the door closes. Collars catch on bars.

What "good" looks like

A dog that takes itself off to the crate when it wants to sleep, with the door open, is the outcome. If that is where you get to, the crate is doing what it should. If your dog will not settle in one after several weeks of patient work, some dogs simply do not, and a bed behind the sofa and a baby gate will do the same job.

Night times

For the first few nights the crate goes next to your bed. A puppy that has never slept alone is not being manipulative when it cries; it is eight weeks old and everything it knew has gone. Move the crate a little further each night if you want it elsewhere eventually. You will lose less sleep this way, not more.