Crate Training
– Craig A Murray When sitting down and giving some serious thought on kennel crating, it’s amazing how the suggestion of it to friends and especially clients can be so easy or impossible to convince them it is both good and natural.
justifications were truly feeble, but the fact that this dog and almost every dog I have owned or trained in home or in kennel over the last 4 or more decades really has strengthened dear old Dad’s credibility on ‘Dogs love kennels’.
My family has always had dogs as far back as my memory will allow. In fact my involvement with dogs goes back even further and is supplemented by my parents always saying I learn’t to walk by holding onto the German Shepherd they owned at the time. I cannot confirm this as my memory does not go back that far, but it is a great story for a person whom always wanted to be a dog trainer and now gets to do exactly that internationally. My memory does go back to my very first dog at about age 9-10 and as was the case for the majority of all pet dogs back then, he lived in the backyard and it was a definite that he had to have a kennel.
Stretching my memory back to think about the thousands of times over this period that I have seen all pure breeds of dogs and their cross breeds (from teacup size to the largest) most have a special place they like to go and get inside somewhere that was more covered or closed in. If not closed in they seek out under things such as beds, coffee tables, up behind lounges or furniture, under cars, caravans, trailers and BBQ’s, sometimes under stairs and verandas. Dogs are now much more accepted inside the house – often inside closets and cupboards. This alone has me confident that this is generally natural, normal and comfort behaviour for most dogs.
My Dad spent a whole weekend building him a dog house/ kennel or if you like the equivalent to a kennel crate without a door. I am convinced that my father had no science or even much reasonable thought as to why he would spend a whole weekend building this for my dog other than to say one of his favourite justifications to everything, ‘Y is a crooked letter and B is no better’, just because I said it works….dogs love kennels. His verbal
A justifying point my wife uses to help people to become more comfortable with the crating process is to say most humans prefer to sleep in a bedroom rather than out under the stars all the time. When the homeless population are asked how do you feel having to sleep out in the open the greater majority report feeling very vulnerable and worried about their safety. Often they will seek out areas that are very similar to those that dogs would accept and
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DOG WORLD November 2020
