Why Kennel Your Maltese

"Kennel" means two different things to dog owners, and a Maltese owner needs to think about both. One is confinement: keeping a dog in a defined space, a run or a pen or a crate, as part of raising and training it. The other is boarding: leaving the dog in someone else's care when you travel. Both are useful. Both are done badly more often than well with a toy breed, because most of the advice was written for a dog that weighs sixty pounds and sleeps outside.

Confinement, and why it is not an outdoor run

Trainers rightly say that a young or unruly dog does better with less freedom, not more. A dog that has the run of the house and yard all day is a dog that is constantly over-stimulated, constantly getting into things, and constantly being told off, and it never learns to settle or to look to its owner for direction. Confining it, with set times for freedom, calms it down, makes it value the time it spends with you, and turns training from a battle into a routine. That is sound, and it applies to a Maltese as much as to any dog.

Where it goes wrong is the word "run". A Maltese in an outdoor kennel run is a dog in danger. It is small enough to be taken by a hawk, hurt by a cat, stolen over a fence, or killed by heat in a Louisiana afternoon, and it is a breed that was made over two thousand years to live indoors with people and does not cope with being outside them. The confinement that works for a Maltese is indoors: a wire pen in the family room, with a crate inside it as a bed and a pad at the other end, and the door opened for supervised time in the house that gets longer as the dog earns it. It does everything the trainer's run does, calms the dog, limits its territory, makes you the source of everything good, and does it where the dog can see you. The crate and pen page describes the setup and the crate page explains why a dog comes to like it.

Boarding: kennel or sitter

Sooner or later you will go somewhere the dog cannot. The choice is a boarding kennel, a sitter who comes to your house, or a sitter who takes the dog into theirs, and for a Maltese the order of preference is usually the reverse of the order most people assume.

A good sitter in your own home is the best option for most Maltese. The dog keeps its bed, its routine, its food and its smells, and simply has a different person on the sofa. A sitter who takes the dog into their house is next best, provided their own animals are small and known to be safe with a tiny dog. A boarding kennel is third, not because kennels are bad but because a Maltese in a row of barking Labradors is a stressed Maltese, and stress in a small dog turns into refusing food, which turns into low blood sugar. If you board, look for a kennel with a separate small-dog area, indoor climate-controlled runs, staff who will hand feed a dog that is off its food, and a vet on call. Visit before you book, unannounced if you can, and go by the smell and the sound as much as by the brochure.

What to leave with whoever has the dog

The dog's own food, in its own bowl, with written feeding times. Its crate and bedding. Honey or corn syrup and a note explaining the signs of low blood sugar and what to do about them; most sitters and kennel staff have never had to deal with it. Your vet's number and your own. A grooming brush and the instruction that the face is wiped daily. And the vaccination record, which every kennel will ask for and every sitter should.

Starting young

A dog that has been crate trained as a puppy, that has spent a night or two away from home before it is a year old, and that has been handled by people other than its family, boards easily. One that has never been apart from its owner for an hour does not. Part of raising a Maltese that can be left is leaving it, briefly and happily, from the start. Our puppies have been handled by a dozen people and slept in a crate before they leave us, and that is on purpose.