Category: Top Dog

we’ve had our 13 week cocker spaniel for 3 weeks and we’ve not made much progress with daytime crate training. he’s fine with it at night and he will dip in and out during the day, but he’d never settle there. he’s still not ok with the door being closed unless he can see we’re about to give him a treat. this is all a work in progress and I know we need to work in slow, small increments of increased duration.

we’re also working on his separation training but again this is still at the level of closing the room door for a few seconds and re-opening.

my question is, how do we enforce naps for a puppy who isn’t crate or play pen trained? currently the only way I can consistently get him to nap is by sitting on my lap to calm down but I fear I’m setting him up for bad habits. even if he does fall asleep in his soft bed or on the floor, the minute one of us goes to leave the room he wakes up to follow and thats nap time over.

feels like a vicious cycle because he’s so overtired all the time which then makes crate training harder

Hey everyone,

If you had to go back and raise your puppy again from day one, what would you do differently with training, routines, and discipline?

What mistakes do you wish you avoided? What habits would you start earlier? What things did you think didn’t matter, but actually mattered a lot? And what daily practices made the biggest difference in your dog turning out well-behaved?

Would love to hear the real, honest stuff people don’t usually mention in basic guides.

Thanks in advance!

I have two puppies and they are potty trained for the most part. But whenever someone they don’t know or someone they don’t see often they get super excited when greeting them and pee right there. I just wanna know if you guys have any tips when it comes to that

I’ve read every crate training problem post on this page at this point, but we have been doing every single thing it says to do on every post, video, forum, chat GPT we can find and none of it is working. I refuse to give up on the crate because I know how important it is when they’re older for boarding and travel purposes.

Our puppy is 10 weeks old. She is husky, so we know she’s vocal about her frustrations. I do not have an issue ignoring her. I work in landscaping so it’s my off season, so I have spent all day every day for the last 2 weeks with her. We have not left her alone yet. We tried a wire crate, but because she bites at it so bad, we bought a standard plastic crate for safety reasons. This is an issue with day-time crate training not just night.

Training has been coming fairly easy to her. Potty training is going well, she know sit, lay down, kennel, come, and no. The issue is staying in the crate. When we realized she is a full-blown crate panicker, we started taking things super slow. We leave the door open and she’ll go in and out on her own, we have her eating all her meals in there, we’ve slowly closed the door for a few seconds giving treats and then building time up with the door closed. We have the crate in a room we move through so she’s not alone. And those are just a few of the things we’ve been doing every day for weeks. When I say there is not a single piece of advice we haven’t tried in the past 2 weeks, I mean it. It doesn’t matter. If we close the door for more than a few seconds and aren’t sitting there with the bag of treats consistently feeding her or if she doesn’t have a frozen Kong or carrot, we are in full-blown panic. I had to build a plexiglass door because she got her jaw stuck in the front door. She claws at it, bites at it, pants, and screams unrelenting for over an hour. It also absolutely makes no difference to her if I’m next to the crate, laying on top of the crate, or in a completely different room. We recently just tried to let her scream it out because this gentle-parenting is not working. She will take breaks for a few seconds where I give her treats and praise, but then it’s right back to the panic. It usually gets to the point where she won’t even eat the treats anymore. She will finally pass out after about an hour from pure exhaustion, but then it’s back to panic once she’s up. Covering the crate also makes no difference.

She can not be left alone in the house during the day because there is no way to confidently puppy proof our older mountain home. We have a play pen that we use for night time, but it has mesh sides, so I’m worried that if we leave her unattended for too long, she’ll rip it and escape.

I’m at the point of just letting her scream during the day and leaving her anyways. I can’t constantly take her with me every time when I need to go to the office or a meeting and rely on my best friend/coworker to watch her. I’m home 90% of the time but I am still meeting with clients about once a week and have an office meeting I need to be at every Tuesday. I know that’s not what you “should” do, but I know she’s safe in there and I won’t have to constantly worry about walking back into a destroyed home and an injured baby.

Thoughts?

I have an 11 month old large mutt mix, and a corgi that I’ve had for a few years. My puppy is very high energy/ high anxiety. Several months ago my corgi got fed up with her and he attacked her and they got into a fight. She plays hard and is a lot bigger than my corgi. Since the fight per my trainers advice I have had the dogs separated by gates. We are working with a trainer every week but still advised to keep them separated until we make more progress with the pup. I try to give them as much equal love and attention as i can but whenever i have one out with me i feel so much guilt when the other one is crated or behind the gate. This has been so hard and I’m always going back in forth in my head if I should rehome her or if I should keep going with the training until we are at a place they can be back together. I love her so much and she has severe separation anxiety I worry how she would feel if I brought her somewhere and never came back for her. Has anyone had experience with a dog fight and their dogs being able to live together after?

My puppy swallowed a 6 in bully stick yesterday and we spent 7 hours at the vet. He is okay, thankfully. I feel like a bad mom! Did you guys ever experience anything similar?

It is very cold and snowy in Wisconsin and the puppy doesn’t like freeze. Understandable but it makes potty training hard. She’ll often hold it for too long just to avoid outside. When she’s really got to go, I still have to carry her out, and then she’ll often go.

I have sweaters and booties which she hates but help her stay out beyond five seconds. But here’s the question, how do I teach her to ask to go outside when it’s the last thing she wants?!! I have a bell, and I have gotten her to ring it but then I open the door and she runs 😂 poor baby.

How long did it take before your puppy understood that potty goes outside, versus just getting lucky she went while you took her out? Once she understands I think this problem gets easier to manage.

This might sound like a really stupid question, but my main focus lately has been recall training… for the sake of upping difficulty I’m looking into going from a 12’ leash to a 30’ leash. Is there any downside or reasoning not to use a retractable leash for this? I know keeping no leash pressure can be important, so I wasn’t sure if a retractable keeps more tension than what would be ideal. If not, the idea of not having to manage a 30’ leash freehand and just going with a retractable seems ideal.

Hi all, my fiance and I got our 7 m/o rescue about 6 weeks ago. He's a great dog, and learning fast, but we are working on leash training. We're very outdoorsy and love taking him on hikes and runs, and he is always on a leash. Even when we play fetch at the park, he's on an extended 33 ft lead. We live in New England, and I have noticed that about 85% of people on the trails and in parks here just fully walk their dogs off leash and the owners NEVER have any recall power over their dogs. They always run up to my leashed dog and the owner always says "they're friendly." Since I know being leashed around loose dogs can lead to reactivity in my dog, I always stand between the loose dog and my dog. But how to deal with the owners?? They never apologize, they never put a leash on, and they never even acknowledge it's a problem. I don't want to be rude but come on… It's driving me nuts!!

(P.S. our dog wears a soft muzzle as we train him out of scavenging for acorns and sticks- you'd think their pooch approaching a muzzled dog would make them grab their dog but it never does.)

Hello! This post is very long because I wanted to share any information possibly necessary to help you guys help me out. I summarized it at the end. Thanks in advance!!

We brought home our mostly angelic Maple about 3 weeks ago. She is a 12 week old Havanese. Training is going mostly really great! We are having lots of success — minimal potty accidents, learning basic obedience, our bond is getting stronger every day — but we are having a weird crate issue! From day one, she has slept AMAZINGLY in her crate, covered with a blanket and listening to white noise. She takes about 4 2-hour naps per day with mostly no issues, except that she cannot settle in her crate on her own.

We have been doing tether training from the second week that we brought her home, which is going great. Depending on how energetic she is, she will settle and fall asleep in between 5 and 20 minutes of tethering. Once she falls asleep, we move her into her crate and she goes right to sleep without fail. HOWEVER, if we try to crate her without doing the tethering routine, she will scream and cry literally endlessly. (I don't remember this being a problem the first few days she was home with us, but she was obviously very overwhelmed and tired then from the new environment.)

(For example, I have an essay I need to work on today so my partner hung out with her and took her on a nice walk, then brought her home and crated her before they left for work. She *seemed* to settle for a minute, and then started screaming. I am really trying not to let her associate screaming with freedom but I also don't want her to associate the crate with screaming, so after about 15 minutes, I waited for a lull in the crying, took her to potty, and put her back in the crate, and she started screaming again. I took her potty another 15 minutes later during a quiet moment, and she started screaming again. I waited another 10 minutes, took her out of the crate, tethered her, and she was asleep within 5 minutes, so she was obviously exhausted!!! I put her back in the crate, and now she's sleeping soundly.)

We are continuously working on positively conditioning the crate. We feed her lots of good things in there, we work on laying down calmly to be let out, etc, and it seems to be working! She generally likes her crate and will pop in and out of it on her own throughout the day! I'm not sure how to fix this particular issue.

TLDR; My puppy sleeps great in the crate, but only if we tether her first and let her get really sleepy before we put her in. Otherwise, she will scream and whine endlessly. Seeking tips on how to help her with this! Happy to answer any questions!