The Dog Crate and Your New Puppy

New owners often arrive with a crate in the car and an apology on their lips, as though a crate were a cage and a cage were a cruelty. We have raised Maltese for thirty-four years and every one of them has had a crate, and we have never met a dog that felt imprisoned by its own bed. The crate is a human idea of a cage and a dog's idea of a den, and the dog's idea is the one that matters.

What a crate is to a dog

Dogs are den animals. Left to themselves they sleep in enclosed, dark, close places, under a table, behind the sofa, in the gap by the bed. A crate is that place, made portable. A dog that has been crate trained as a puppy goes into its crate on its own in the evening, retreats to it when the house is noisy, sleeps in it with the door open, and takes it with it, as home, to the car, the hotel, the vet and the boarding kennel. The crate is not where the dog is kept. It is where the dog keeps itself.

What it does for you

It housebreaks the puppy, because a dog will not soil its bed if it has any choice, and a crate makes that choice. It keeps the puppy safe in the hours nobody can watch it, from cords, from stairs, from the recliner, from the things on the puppy proofing page. It saves the furniture during teething. It gives the puppy a place to sleep away from children who want to play. It makes travel easy and vet stays bearable. And it means that a Maltese, which is a dog that wants to be in the middle of everything, can live in the middle of everything without ever being underfoot at the wrong moment.

What it does for the puppy

A puppy that is never confined is a puppy that is always being told no. It chews the wrong thing, is scolded, goes on the rug, is scolded, gets under a foot, is scolded, and learns that the house is a place where it is forever in trouble. A puppy with a crate is a puppy that is only loose when someone is watching and ready to praise, and is asleep in its den the rest of the time. It gets into less trouble, so it hears less anger, so it trusts people more. The crated puppy is the confident one. The free puppy, a year later, is the one shut in the laundry room because nobody could stand it.

When a crate is wrong

When it is used for too long. A crate is for nights, naps and short absences, not for a working day; a dog crated nine hours a day is not being given a den, it is being given a cell, and a Maltese, which must eat often and wants company constantly, suffers more than most. When it is used as a punishment, which turns the den into a prison in one afternoon. When the dog is left in it with a collar on. And when it is used instead of training rather than as part of it: a crate keeps a puppy out of trouble, but only the hours outside the crate teach it what trouble is. The crate and pen page covers the hours, and for anyone who works, the pen that takes the crate's place during the day.

How it starts

With the door open and a meal inside, and not with a puppy pushed in and a door shut behind it. The step by step page takes it from the first day to the first night to the first time you leave the house. Done that way, in two weeks the puppy has a room of its own and you have a dog that can be trusted in the house. Done the other way, you have a puppy that screams in a box, and we would rather you had no crate at all than that.