It's been just a few weeks since we brought puppy Euchre home and crate training
is going really well.
We've noticed in the comments that some of you are struggling a little bit with
crate training. So in today's video,
we're going to talk about what a big difference the location of your crate can
make in the success of your crate training. I'm Kayl McCann.
This is puppy Euchre. Welcome back to McCann Dogs.
The initial stages of bringing Euchre home within the first couple of days,
we ensured that we kept the crate in the same location that we were at at all
times, whether we were in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom,
our little puppy crate transported around to us with us, wherever we went.
And the reason why we did this, we wanted to keep an eye on her, we wanted a,
to work on a bit of bonding, but also in the beginning stages,
we needed to know whether she actually had to go outside for a pee or what the
issue was.
So it's a really good idea to make sure that you keep the crate very close to
you. No matter where you are in the first couple of days, they're home.
There we go. Good girl,
there's more. There we go.
So I'm just gonna let her eat in here for a little bit.
She's just had to the play though, and then she's gonna have some food.
So once she started eating and settled for a little bit back outside,
he go feels like we go outside a million times a day.
So she's crying in there.
She basically said you just went from doing all this stuff with me to putting me
in a crate. Again, I'm not going to worry about this.
Just going to let her cry it out for a little bit.
When she settles and figures out that there's food there,
then I'll take her out from there. See there she settled right away,
you just have to be patient with with the screaming just it's is such a new
thing for her. There we go.
Although it's really good tactic to keep the crate near you all the time.
It's not something that you want to do forever.
So as your puppy starts to settle into the crate,
it's a really good idea to start teaching them that you're not always going to
be in the same room and you can start things like this. In simple situations,
like giving them their meals,
rather than staying in the same room with them as they're busy, eating away,
sneak down the stairs or sneaking into the other room so that it's not such a
big, noticeable thing that you're moving away.
You may also choose to put them in the crate in the kitchen, for example,
and then watch TV in the living room, have them just around the corner.
You can hear them if something's up,
but you're not necessarily together at all times.
It is important that when your puppy goes in the crate that they learn to kind
of just chill out, it's their place.
There also needs to be some separation and some independence created.
So you don't have a dog that gets anxious when they can't see you,
or they're not with you.
When we start to get the dog more comfortable being crated in a room when we're
not there,
we choose to do this at very specific times where we know there's a higher rate
of success bound to happen. So for example,
when we first started to crate her in the room when we weren't there,
I would make sure that before that I knew she had had any food that she needed
to have, we did a bit of play. We did some training.
So by the time she was going to be put in the crate, she was tired.
She was worn out from all that stuff. And I knew she was more likely to nap.
It's not a good idea to put them in the crate when they still have a lot of
energy,
because they're going to be wondering where you are and they're going to be a
bit more noticeable.
So take advantage of sleepy times or eating times times when you know,
they're going to go on and be a bit more calm.
That's a great time to slip into the other room and just spend a little bit of
time apart. For her first week home, Ken
And I try to make sure that we weren't both gone out of the house at the same
time. That way, if she made any noise, we could take her out.
We were here to do so, but that's not life pretty soon. You know,
we both need to do things. So the very first time that we left her alone,
we had a bit of a plan in place.
And we've actually included some of that in the second video that we did.
And if you want to check that out, the link is in the description below,
before I left her for the first time,
I first put on some music just to have a little bit of background noise.
And I also filled a Kong, full of delicious treats.
And I gave it to her in the crate. And before I actually left the house,
I just slipped into our little, a sunroom area. That's just near the door.
And I just waited quietly where she couldn't see me. And I sat there,
sort of fiddling around on my phone for five or 10 minutes just to make sure she
was settled.
I would peek at her through the window just to make sure she was calm.
She was just so engaged in her toy,
in her Kong that I was able to slip out the door. And when I came home,
I also didn't make a big deal about coming home.
I didn't want to make her anxious or over excited. So I came in the door again.
I peeked out a little bit. She's just sort of laying there. Calmly.
I walked in the house, just sort of said, hello,
didn't make a big deal out of her. And then after being home for a few moments,
I went and let her out.
You do want to be careful about when you go and leave that you don't make a big
deal out of it because that actually can sometimes cause puppies to get a little
bit more stress stressed or anxious. You want to be very neutral about that.
And in the early stages, distract them before you go make it. You know,
something that 10 minutes before you leave,
you're sort of starting a plan about, about leaving,
to make things just a little easier for your puppy to handle.
And Euchre's first video,
we shared with you a pretty unusual tip that we do with our puppies in terms of
the crate location. And that is elevating the crate,
either up on the countertops or on our bedside table.
We do this for a couple of reasons. Number one, when we first brought her home,
we have other pets and animals in the house,
and we didn't want her first experience in the great to be, you know,
swarmed by the other dogs, wondering who this new puppy was in the home.
So by propping her up on the Island, it allowed her to have a bit of separation.
She could still see our face very easily and the other dogs couldn't bother her.
Now in the bedroom, we do this same thing,
clearing everything off the bedside table and having her up there nice and close
to us, just allows her to feel like she's a little closer.
It's the next best thing to sleeping in the bed.
Which she's not going to be doing anytime soon, being a baby puppy.
But it also allowed me to stick my fingers in the crate door to settle her if
needed. And then when she whined,
I was able to hear very easily and then take her outside for a pee.
And we actually let them sleep up there for a couple of days until they're
getting more comfortable sleeping throughout the night.
And then we can transfer the crate back to the floor,
but this tactic elevating them to really help settle the puppies more quickly
and keep some of the natural distractions in your house, away from them,
making sure that they stay a little calmer.
After the first week or so as your puppy starts to get more comfortable in the
crate, you're going to want to choose a location in your house.
That's really central. Dogs really want to be around you and the family,
but they don't necessarily need to be on top of you all day long.
So pick a general place in your house that your family and you are going to be
passing by on a regular basis for us,
we have an open house and our kitchen is sort of the main place we all hang out.
So our puppy's crate is usually in the kitchen on the main floor.
And that way we're in and out and walk by her all day long.
We can acknowledge her. We can ignore her.
And she just sort of learns to chill out as the family goes about their day.
Because we move the crates around so much in our house.
We ended up actually buying more than one crate.
This might be something that makes life a little easier for you.
We typically have a crate in the central area of our home.
We have a crate in our bedroom. We have a crate in our car.
We have a crate at work and this just allows us to Mo move the puppy around and
always have a place for them to go.
And then it's easy to either keep them with you or separate them depending on
what you're doing.
This is actually one of the reasons why we really love plastic sided crates.
They're a little cleaner, they're easier to move around.
And I find a lot of dogs are actually quite comfortable in them because they
feel a lot like a den in some cases as well. If you find your puppy,
isn't settling as much as they should.
You could also cover the crate with a blanket or something that sort of breaks
off of the vision of your puppy.
Sometimes that they can't see all that busy stuff and get excited by it.
They're much more likely just to calm down and chill out and lie down.
So there's a couple of tips that might help you with that.
One of the best ways to crate train your puppy is to use the crate all day long.
And I don't mean consecutively. I just mean in and out the crate,
whenever you need to, you know,
when we have a young puppy and they're not quite ready to make decisions on
their own in terms of, you know, maybe house training or chewing.
And we have a busy day that we have to tend to being able to put them in the
crate is really important. So with the location of the crate,
you want to make sure it's somewhere really convenient.
So if you need to run to the bathroom, or if you want to have a shower,
if you're cooking lunch or helping your kids with homework,
these are all really perfect times that you can pop your puppy in the crates.
Now we don't want the crate to be optional for your puppy.
So we don't recommend having the crate door open and just let your puppy roam in
and out all day long. When they're young,
you want to actually put them in the crate, close the door,
let them chill out for, you know, a half hour, a couple of minutes, an hour,
a couple hours, whatever happens, take them out, do something with them.
And then when you're finished, put them back away. And as they get older,
they're obviously going to be able to have more loose time in your house,
but you need to make sure you go through the process of training and teaching
them how to make the choices.
And one of the best ways to do that is to supervise them when they're out of the
crate.
So keeping that crate in a handy spot where you can just pop them in and out all
day long is really going to make life so much easier for you.
And it's going to be making the crate a less stressful process for your puppy as
well. Many of you mentioned how impressed you were, that you were,
was able to sleep through the night in her crate within the first couple of days
home. And I'm going to tell you why that went so successfully.
It's not really about the nighttime crate training.
It's about all of the time she was spending in her crate throughout the day.
One of the biggest mistakes people make in their crate training is they only put
their puppy in the crate at night,
or when they're going to leave the house and some puppies will start to
associate, you put me in that crate, you disappear.
And I don't really like going in there.
So it's really important that you're using that crate throughout the day to make
sure that your puppy doesn't see it as you leaving them.
They see it as a place where they can go and chill out.
If you've seen the first couple of episodes of the series,
you'll know that Euchre's already doing a pretty great job with her training,
but over the next couple of weeks,
we're going to have to overcome a lot of these common puppy challenges.
And we're going to show you exactly what we do to deal with them.
So if you're here for puppy content,
make sure you hit that like button and let us know.
If you haven't seen the first episode where we bring Euchre home and we show you
the first 24 hours of having her here, you need to check that out.
You can do that by clicking that card right here.
If you have a new puppy and you're looking for advice specific to your puppy,
check out our puppy essentials online training program.
The link is in the description below on that note. I'm Kayl.
I'll see you guys in the next video.