03/08/2025
Fantastic post about crate training!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DN1kk5k8R/
Dogs should not be micromanaged for our amusement or convenience
I am honestly tired of reading posts where people ask for help with dogs who are crated for many hours at a time and never have free access to the home or garden. Dogs whose entire lives consist of being rotated between a cage and structured training or play times or supervised periods (often on lead) in the garden or house. Dogs who never get to just roam around the home and settle where they like. Dogs who never have any free time, where nothing is expected of them, unless they are confined to a cage that they can do nothing more than turn around in. Dogs who are expected to accept their incarceration without a murmur and are deemed problematic if they show any signs of distress.
Yes, I understand that many people find crate training useful for things like house training and generally managing puppies for SHORT periods of time, when they are not able to keep a close eye on them. I also understand that there are some dogs who have been introduced carefully to crates who seem to view them as a safe place to retreat to VOLUNTARILY when they want to rest or have something to chew and don’t want to be interfered with by others. This post is not about these reasonable uses of SHORT TERM confinement.
This post is about those who believe it is okay for dogs to essentially live in a cage, except for those times when we want to actively do something with them. It is this sadly too common attitude that we need to talk about and I have no idea how we have reached a place where it is remotely thought to be acceptable. Zoo animals are treated better than this. I find the number of posts on supposedly positive reinforcement-based training groups, where people ask advice about how to stop their dogs objecting to being confined to a crate, truly distressing. One would hope that at least there might be some desperate reason for the dog’s confinement (such as recovery from injury or risk of severe conflict with another dog in the home), but when this question is asked, the answers I have seen recently have been as follows:
• I crate and rotate all my dogs, because it is convenient for me to live with them like that
• Other people in my home don’t like dogs, so they cannot be freely in the home and must be confined to one room anyway
• I like my dogs to have individual time with me, so only want one out at a time, so that their focus is on me and nothing else
• My dog “works” better if he doesn’t have any free time on his own
• My old dog doesn’t like other dogs, so when I got a puppy, I knew I would have to crate and rotate them permanently
• My dog is destructive when left alone at home, so needs to be confined to a crate so they can’t do any damage to anything in the home
I am sorry, but living in a cage and only coming out for short periods of time, because it is convenient, because the dog performs better in some training task, because you want your dog’s entire world to be you, because your dog has separation distress or is bored out of his mind being left alone for 8-10 hours a day, because you added a dog to your home KNOWING that your other dog would never accept them or because the dog isn’t even welcome by your family in the home in the first place, is not a decent life for a dog.
I understand and empathise with people who end up in a situation where their dogs, who started off fine together, end up becoming incompatible for some reason and have to live separately. I understand that in such incredibly difficult situations “crate and rotate” may be the only option other than re-homing or euthanasia. I truly get that and know that in such cases this may be the only and best option to save both dogs. But what I don’t accept, is people who know that one of their dogs is intolerant of other dogs, yet they still go out an get another dog, PLANNING to use crate and rotate as a way to have more dogs – often because they want another dog for some sport or other and totally disregarding how unfair it is to deliberately get a dog, knowing that their life will be so extremely restricted.
And no, living in a cage and coming out for a few hours a day to engage in some high intensity activity which the dog seems to be excited about, is not a good life. Welfare depends largely on choice and freedom. Emotional wellbeing hinges on having opportunities to meet fundamental needs: the need for social contact, the need for freedom of movement, the need to explore, the need to find comfortable places to rest, the need to play and the need to respond to stimuli in the environment, by being able to move around and investigate what is going on.
Of course, our dogs cannot have 100% access to all these things all the time, but they should at the very least have the freedom to explore their own living environment and make themselves comfortable in it for most of the day. They should be able to seek out social contact and reassurance from others in the home and should be able to entertain themselves with play, when they feel like it.
Unless you are forced to, because of a life and death situation, why would you ever want to take this away from them? Why would you want to cage them and restrict their lives so much, if you supposedly love them and want them to be content and happy? Are our dogs valued family members, whose needs we respect? Or are they nothing more than an extension of our own needs, desires and ego?
Unless your dog is going to be a valued family member and their basic and fundamental needs will be more important than your convenience or ego, rather don't take a dog into your home.
Welcome to Mystic Chateau Acres Dog Training! Karen is a certified Animal Behavior College Dog Trainer.
