Your new puppy is home, you’re excited and happy with your choice. Now comes the sometimes daunting task of training your puppy, with one of the first tasks being training your puppy to relieve himself outside, not on the living room floor. One popular and successful way of training your puppy is called crate training. In summary, you restrain your puppy in a dog cage for a good deal of the time. Puppies will generally not relieve themselves in the small space where they sleep, unless they are left there too long.
How does using a dog cage work? It works pretty well actually. When we brought our Golden Retriever pup home we started crate training from the first moment we brought her inside. It may sound cruel to keep the puppy in a crate, but it’s not cruel at all if done correctly. We let her wander around outside, sniff the ground, in the area where we would direct her to normally relieve herself. Once she went pee we brought her inside and let the family have some play time with her. At first, we’d take her outside every couple of hours, when she was awake, as puppies have very small bladders.
Once play time was over we put her into her dog cage. She could still see all the activity going on around her, and though she whined a bit at first she soon came to think of the dog cage as her haven, a place away from everything where she could sleep and rest. Puppies nap a lot. Usually she’s settle down and take a nap. As soon as she woke from her nap we’d take her out of the dog cage to her ’spot’ outside, and we’d wait with her then till she’d done her business. Of course we’d praise her loudly whenever she relieved herself. Then we’d take her back inside, and depending on what was going on, we’d either leave her out for a bit of run-around and play time, or we’d pop her back into her crate. Usually we’d let her run around for a while, outside of the crate but sometimes we had to put her back in the dog cage if no one was around to watch her or if we were busy doing something and she’d get underfoot.
Following that routine, of taking her from her dog cage outside to relieve herself, then taking her back inside, she was trained within a few days. In fact, she rarely had any accidents inside, and when she did it was usually our fault for not taking her outside often enough or for not noticing her when she stood by the door.
Of course we’d also take her out about 15 minutes after she ate, and waited till she’d had a bowel movement before bringing her back in. First thing in the morning we’d take her out too, and last thing, before we went to bed ourselves at night. When she was very little she’d wake once or twice during the night, whining and we’d need to take her out then too but within the month she was sleeping all through the night.
It was a bit of work at first, but considering how tough it can be to train a puppy, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to train her with the dog cage method. I’d highly recommend it for others who are trying to train their puppy.