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How do you feel about transporting your dogs in secured crates in the back of the truck?

The crates would be tied down/secured.

Opinions?

I'm trying to understand why potty training works.

So, when the puppy goes potty outside, you praise and treat (positive) which would make it like to go potty outside. That piece makes sense. When a puppy goes potty inside, you are supposed to *not* react, and just calmly clean up (neutral). I guess the rationale is that eventually, the puppy will not want to potty inside, because it would rather do it outside and get the treat. That seems surprising to me because dogs do all sorts of behaviors that don't result in treats. e.g. a dog may know that when you say "sit", it will get a treat for sitting, but that doesn't mean it will be reluctant to just sit other times, if it wont get a treat. So why would it not want to potty indoors?

And then eventually, after lots of training, the puppy will start whining when it needs to go potty and "ask" to be let out. So, is it whining because it knows that if it goes potty inside it wont get the treat for doing it outside? Dogs don't usually whine if they know that they are about to do a behavior that wont result in treats, so why here?

I know that also puppies don't want to go potty in their crate, and part of it maybe that eventually they learn that your house is "home" and not a place to go to the bathroom. But what about other people's houses and other indoor places?

I feel like I'm missing something about the behavioral science here?

Hi All,

Little background — I have an eight-month old Havanese puppy. I got him at 10-weeks old and have primarily raised him by myself.

For anyone currently going through puppy blues or wondering whether there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, let me be your sign that there is and that it gets so much better!! I had one week of really bad puppy blues right after I got my puppy — mainly from sleep deprivation, but also from the overall lifestyle change and additional responsibility that comes along with owning a puppy. Once my mindset shifted (and once I got some more sleep), the puppy blues went away. However, of course, I still had a puppy on my hands. I spent a lot of time and effort training, bonding, and socializing my puppy over the summer. At times, it felt more like a job than anything.

BUT, somewhere along the way, my puppy matured. Rather than having to put my puppy in his crate for enforced naps on a schedule, I find myself snuggling up for a nap and him settling down right next to me with a yak until he falls asleep himself. I now have a buddy to go on walks with when I need to run errands, and a playmate when I want to let off steam after work. We eat together, watch tv together, play together, and sleep right next to each other (for naps, he’s still crated at night). He’s my favorite part of my day.

It didn’t happen overnight and aspects of his behavior are a result of a lot of training (i.e., he used to cry when I would leave the room, now he settles nicely and chills out). I also know that I still have a long road ahead as he’s in the midst of the teenage phase. But, I see my little man poking through the puppy antics and craziness and couldn’t be happier. And I promise, all of the time and effort spent raising your puppy pays off.

Today my gf took my 3.5-month-old puppy into my job. My manager bent down to pet him, and out of nowhere he bit her hand and drew a little bit of blood.

There was no growling, no stiffness, no barking, no warning signs. She said it wasn’t hard — that his tooth just “caught her,” but it still freaked me out because it did break the skin.

He’s usually very sweet, and this is the first time he’s ever done something like this. The store environment was a little busy but as I work at Home Depot.

Is this normal puppy behavior (teething/startle nip), or something I should be worried about? And how should I handle training going forward so this doesn’t happen again?

I’ve been trying to foster with my local rescues but they just want to keep the dogs in the shelter. I have a huge yard that is fenced in. It has a separate gated and fenced dog run. I work from home. I’m home all the time. I have love to give. I’m not super young and I’m not old. I’ve had pets before.

I’ve been waiting a month already to foster with one of the Humane Societies. I asked the foster coordinator last week about fostering a dog she had been waiting weeks for someone to foster. She told me she may have someone lined up and that she’s not planning to have any foster candidates until January. Well today she sent another email about this same dog that I offered to foster saying she still needs someone to foster, even if for a short period. Like wtf? I already told her I would and every time I talk to her she blows me off. She waits until closing time at the end of the week, where she will be off for the next two days, to send out this email. She doesn’t respond to any emails I send her otherwise. I feel like she is just collecting a paycheck and not actually trying to help animals at the shelter.

There is 1 fearful cat at this shelter. Cat has 3 legs and 6 toes. They won’t even let her out of the cage for someone to see her unless they agree to adopt her.

There is an underweight Great Pyrenees adult dog. They don’t have enough volunteers to make sure he is eating more. When I visited, they didn’t even realize he was thirsty until he started drinking dirty ground water.

The dog they want someone to foster had knee surgery and needs a calm environment. I live alone. My house is quiet. Like wtf.

I feel like these three animals should be foster candidates. They’ve been in the shelter for 2-4 weeks. This place is getting like 2 adoptions a day and they are talking about bringing in 25 more animals per week each week of December. It’s not that big of a shelter.

I want to help these animals and I’m so frustrated that these “humane” societies want to keep these animals locked up when one of them could come home with me.

I’m honestly about to just go adopt a puppy for $1800 because it seems like none of these shelters will ever let me foster their animals.

My four month old has separation anxiety big time. We’ve been working hard and today for the first time, she relaxed in her kennel after 20 minutes of just low grumbles versus screaming and meltdowns. She actually licked her treat for the first time ever in a crate! But then she had dinner in her crate as always, which she is fine with and I snuck into the shower. The second her meal was done she started spiraling and declined rapidly into super screaming and banging around.

I feel like I’ll never be able to leave my house again. I feel like I’m going to lose all my friends because I keep saying no to invites and they’ve never had a puppy so they think I’m nuts. I’m struggling today. Help.

Hi everyone! A week ago I brought home a black english lab! He just hit 9 weeks and my boyfriend and I wanted to start doing some training in the crate where he stays alone. For context, he has never been alone in the apartment without us being there, I WFH and my boyfriend is doing his masters, so he’s frequently home too.

For the past week we’ve been crate training him and he’s done so well, all his meals are in there, I put treats in the crate before he goes in, he has a blanket that smells like us and one that smells like his family, and a stuffed toy and a chew. I think we’re at the point where he’s comfortable in his crate and going to sleep, I’m trying to work up to him voluntarily going into his crate, but he’s still just a puppy and doesn’t know when he needs a nap, so that’s a WIP.

To the title though, we want to start training him to do well in the crate when we’re not here. This is mainly so we get a bit of time to go out and go grocery shopping, run other errands, or feel like we have a life outside the 4 walls of our living room, so less than 3-4 hours for sure. What did you do to acclimate your dog to this change, any tips for us, or any videos or articles I could look at? Thank you for any help!

Hi friends, back again

Little girl cockapoo will be 5 months old on the 27th. She’s wonderful (and for anyone who’s seen my previous posts, living her best life w babysitters and puppy friends when we’re not with her). But there’s 2 concerns I have right now.

The first is that she’s still teething and the bigger she gets the more her bites hurt. She has all of her adult teeth now but her canines, which if need be will come out in 2 months when she’s spayed. Is it normal to continue teething even once most adult teeth are in? Any recommendations aside from redirection, which only work momentarily?

Secondly, she has no concept of no-nos. We’ve been trying to teach her “no bite” and we say “toy” and point which she has gotten better about but only when she’s not catastrophe level zoomy. I feel awful because I go back and forth between being horrible at telling her no because I can’t help but laugh when I see her little face, and getting so frustrated I cry. We have been trying reverse timeouts, and timeouts in her pen but even this seems to only stop her for about 20 minutes before the biting comes back.

The part that makes the least sense to me is that she’s actually amazing at other things- she tells us when she needs to go potty, understands what “bed time” means, does great with “sit” and is much better at sitting still for brushing/teeth cleaning/ear cleaning. Why is the biting the thing she can’t seem to get?

Where do you all go to find Christmas gifts and sweaters for your dogs?

Hello. I have a problem with my dog barking and I would really appreciate some advice. We bought a house in June and my dog has had a very hard time adapting. We have always lived either in houses with no neighbours or in flats, so the noise from cars has affected her a lot.

My problem is that we live in a newly built area where lorries and vans keep using our allocated parking space. On top of that, our own parking space is not directly in front of our windows but further away, so there are cars coming and going all day long. It obviously took us some time to figure out what was happening, and now my dog stays at home with a brown noise machine. I’ve recorded her, and she is doing much better.

However, I’m worried because before we started using the noise machine, our neighbour complained about us to the developer. That was when we discovered that there are Deeds or Conditions saying that it is forbidden to have animals that cause a nuisance. The issue is that this neighbour has targeted us, and although my dog no longer barks like before, the other day she accidentally got upstairs, had access to a window, and barked for several hours without us realising. Obviously, this person doesn’t understand that sometimes incidents happen. It wasn’t during unsociable hours — it was between 12 and 8, and it wasn’t non-stop; she would bark, stop, start again, stop again, and so on. I understand it was annoying, but I also feel that this person is making our life impossible.

The problem is that the developer’s solicitor threatened us and basically told us to be grateful that we admitted we were trying to train our dog and that we should keep quiet because we had a lot to lose. Obviously, we want to train the dog, but money is also an issue right now, so we don’t know what options we have or whether we really have as much to lose as the neighbours’ solicitor claims.

We wanted to ask for advice on what we can do and what rights we have, especially because these “dog conditions” in the deeds were never explained to us until after the incident. We had already signed the contract for the house, and coincidentally the solicitor recommended to us by the developer never mentioned these conditions.

In addition to all this, we have the problem that the neighbour keeps making our life miserable — even standing outside with other people, telling them how “bad” my dog is right in front of my house. And he has a dog that barks exactly the same; he just happens to live on a corner plot, so his dog simply doesn’t hear as many cars as mine does, because cars constantly pass in front of my door.