Dog Training in Frederick, MD

Not punishment, and not storage. It does four jobs and only one of them is containment.

It gives the dog somewhere that nothing is required of him. In an open plan house, and in a full one, there is no room a dog can go to where he is not part of whatever is happening. Dogs need to be off duty and a lot of them never get to be. A dog with a den sleeps properly, and a dog who sleeps properly is a different animal by about week three.

It makes house training fast rather than slow, because it removes the opportunity to get it wrong unsupervised. That is the whole mechanism. Nothing about it is punitive.

It makes everything else in a dog's life easier later. A dog who is comfortable in a crate copes with the vet, with a night after surgery, with a car, with a hotel and with a stay somewhere unfamiliar. A dog who has never been in one meets his first crate on the worst day of his life, at a veterinary practice, already frightened. That is the argument that persuades most people, and it should.

And it protects the household during the months a young dog cannot be trusted, which is what stops the relationship souring. Most of the resentment I see between people and their dogs was built in a year of small damage that a closed door would have prevented.

The argument for a den is different downtown than it is in the new communities, and both are real.

In the historic core the constraint is space and proximity. Narrow stairs, small rooms, shared alleys, party walls, and a front door that opens straight onto a busy sidewalk. There is nowhere for a dog to be out of the way, and every noise from the street is close. A den gives him somewhere the world is not, which matters more the smaller the house is.

In Whittier, Kellerton, Dearbought and Worman's Mill the constraint is the opposite: open plan, sight lines through the whole ground floor, common paths and ponds outside the window, and a dog with a view of everything and no boundary anywhere. A crate or a defined place is the only way to say where he should be when there are no doors to close.

Either way the surrounding conditions are the same and they are not gentle. Frederick sits in a valley between Catoctin Mountain and Parrs Ridge with the Monocacy River, Carroll Creek, Tuscarora Creek and Rock Creek running through developed ground, so deer, geese and foxes are ordinary. Carroll Creek's linear park fills and echoes during events. I-70, I-270, US 15, freight rail, the MARC line, Fort Detrick and the municipal airport all contribute sound. A dog with nowhere to switch off is being asked to monitor all of that continuously.

There is a growth point worth making too, because it changes who is asking. A city that added roughly fourteen thousand people in five years is a city full of households in their first year somewhere, and a lot of those households got a dog at the same time as the move. Two big changes at once is hard on a dog, and the thing that steadies him fastest is not more attention, it is a fixed place he can retreat to that came with him and did not change. That is the argument for setting the den up in the first fortnight rather than after something has gone wrong.

One caution, because it is the failure mode. A crate is not a solution to a dog being alone too long, and a dog shut in one for a full working day is not being trained, he is being stored. If the hours are the problem then the hours are what we talk about, and my anxiety and nervousness page covers where ordinary settling ends and real distress begins.