Microstep Crate Training

The video should be self explanatory. The original video was 15 minutes long, I had to cut a lot of it and speed up the clips quite a bit. Nobody would watch a 15 minutes crate training video, especially when it’s a “watch paint dry” training.

The point of this video was to show how important it is to go slow and never force a dog when you are dealing with fear. One mistake can create a major set back. In Louie’s case, I never bothered to crate train him using a plastic crate. I knew he didn’t like them so I used a wire crate instead. Many dogs feel less trapped in a wire crate. I never thought he’d be flying to NY! I am sort of glad that it worked out that way. He could have become terrified of the plastic crate after the flight. He would still be OK with the wire crate that he had lots of pleasant experiences with. Chances are he’d never have to be in the plastic crate ever again.

This training took numerous baby steps, steps you don’t see in the video. Lots of repetitions before moving on to the next step. Numbers of breaks in between. The key was to make him believe that he was working to get what he wanted, not the other way around. If you try to make a dog do things, it’s no longer fun for them. Fear intensifies when forced. But you do reverse psychology on them, you will see a different kind of motivation! Many of the “tricks” used here can be utilized to crate train any dogs.

Question you might have. “Why can’t you just push him in the crate at the airport?” Sure I could have. But that would certainly increase his anxiety. I wanted him to find the crate as a safe place, not a scary place in the scary airline cargo.

A great article on “What to do when your dog hates his crate”