Hey y’all, wanted to hear your opinions on how my wife and I are crate training. Both first time dog owners. We just got a new Berner girl 9 weeks, breeder said she was confident, didn’t take shit from anybody and was relatively independent compared to her litter.
We’re in the process of crate training and night 1 of training was last night after a week or so of acclimating to our house. She’s slowly getting the hang of potty training and so during the day we leave the crate open, but roughly every 2 hours she’ll start whining and now is looking to go to the door which is our cue – she’ll pee/poop, we’ll give her a treat and positively reinforce while we’re outside, and when we go inside we say “crate” and put a few treats in there. She’ll go in and eat the treats but we don’t close the door, our purpose is to just positively reinforce the crate and let her explore it at her leisure. We’re slowly putting in daytime crate time when she’s super tired and napping just for her to get used to it.
At night we put her to bed at 10ish. We go out for one last pee, do the same reinforcement, and gently nudge her in the crate (she’s 2/3 the way in when she’s eating her treats). The first 3 nights she whined nonstop and all we did was put our hand in the crate if it was sustained and clearly a nuisance but yesterday and today we noticed a change where she’ll whine but we “ignore” it for a few minutes and she’ll just stop on her own. Is this an overall sign she’s taking well to crate training? Is there anything else you guys would do differently? I read online the whimpering and then suddenly stopping is a sign of her being stressed but logic tells me it’s that she’s self soothing and falling asleep (kind of like a baby who’s “crying it out”. She has her favorite toys in there, a comfy bed with a blanket her momma was covered in that came w the breeder and a worn tshirt from me and my wife so there’s familiarity. Thanks!
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