I recently had the pleasure of fostering two adorable, affectionate, and very smart Pit/Husky mix puppies from the same litter – one male, Rolly, and one female, Penny. I want to walk through their two very different experiences, and what they show about the benefits of crate training from day one.
We picked up Rolly at 8 weeks old, and the first thing we did when we brought him into the house was introduce him to his crate – a soft blanket, a few toys, made as comfortable as possible. We used the ‘kennel up’ command and rewarded him with treats for going in, and we didn’t let him out until he was told ‘free.’
Rolly was a true alpha. He played hard from the minute he arrived and crashed just as hard, with no fear of our three-year-old, 100-pound German Shepherd. He napped in his crate for every nap, sometimes two hours at a stretch, three or four times a day on a fairly regular schedule. Within a few nights, he was sleeping through the night.
About a week after Rolly went to his forever home, we picked up his 13-week-old sister Penny to foster. She wasn’t as fearless as Rolly, considerably more mellow, having spent over a month at another foster home with the rest of her litter. We brought her in and immediately introduced her to a crate too – but that afternoon, after she fell asleep on the floor playing with our dog Magnum, she started wailing the moment we closed the crate door for her first nap. We could still hear her from down the block on our walk.
Penny sleeps in her crate at night, but she isn’t crate trained, and there’s a real difference. Without that day-one foundation, she developed separation anxiety – she’s fine as long as she can see her person, but gets upset the moment she loses sight of them. Her nap schedule stayed irregular, which threw off potty training too. She doesn’t get the same uninterrupted sleep puppies need, and there’s simply no break from the puppy chaos.
Rolly, by contrast, benefited in every one of those ways from being crate trained from day one. He has no separation anxiety and felt completely safe napping alone. We used a baby monitor to catch him the moment he started to fuss, took him straight outside, and by 12 weeks old his routine was established with accidents down to almost zero. He played hard, napped hard, and got the uninterrupted sleep he needed. Practicing ‘kennel up’ and ‘free’ several times a day even sped up the rest of his obedience training.
There’s a real difference between having your puppy sleep in a crate and actually crate training them. I encourage every new puppy owner to crate train from day one – it will make your life, and your pup’s life, so much easier.