In case you were wondering, the answer to “How long can a puppy bark and howl?” is “Half the bloody freakin’ night”.
At least I think she’s starting to relax and figure out she lives here, anyway. She’s now following along with me on leash with only little encouragement.
Anyway, putting all three of the dogs in the crate together yesterday morning seems to have helped with Hilda’s barking a little, but that was because Leno and Fiona were barking instead. Yes, Leno. Mr. Barks Once a month whether he needs to or not is now barking at the puppy. Even more this morning. I think he’s telling her, “Back off, junior.”
Anyway, I tried something with the crate, both downstairs and the second half of the night after I moved the crate to next to my bed. As I slipped on some ice yesterday and was a little sore from that, I didn’t really think lying on the floor again would be a good idea. Anyway, string cheese. I didn’t have proper training treats, I will have tomorrow, so I used tiny pieces of string cheese. When she was quiet, or remained quiet for a while, i fed her tiny pieces of string cheese through the closed crate door. Now, she seems to be mostly fine if I’m within string cheese distance. I reckon this is progress. BTW, it isn’t just the crate. It’s also tie down. I had to put her on tie down to clean up when she peed in the big communal crate this morning. At least that’s easy to clean, but she peed in there yesterday while I was feeding and parking Leno, and Alena cleaned but did not spray the crate floor. So this morning, she walked in and peed before I could stop her. So had to put her on a tie down to go get paper towels and clean it up, and she made her usual ruckus. It might be that she doesn’t like me getting too far away. It might be she doesn’t like being confined, although I think it’s more the former than the latter, since she only barks and howls like that when confined *and* she perceives I’m somehow out of reach. If she’s frustrated at not being able to go further than the end of the leash, she whines and grumbles a bit, but that’s it.
I also yesterday made the mistake of letting her off leash to play with a ball. I think she wasn’t quite comfortable getting it into her mouth, because she ran after it, then ran back to me without it. Then when I threw it again, she ran off and took a dump in a couple places. Which got cleaned up of course.
Yesterday and this morning, we started to introduce “sit” and “down”. Just with a lure of a toy. Down got at least introduced this morning, when she just plopped down to get the toy as I moved it. I think she’ll pick up on both just fine.
We also started to introduce lying down by my chair at the table, just by putting her on a short leash and stepping on the leash. No big deal there, except maybe this morning she’s a bit more wound up.
We’re also trying to get her to not bite on things. Mostly nothings like me. Mostly by yowling in pain and then giving her a bone or other chew. Or, in the case of the leash, carpet, whatever, taking it away and then giving her an appropriate thing to chew.
She actually rolled over for a belly rub this morning.
One thing they don’t tell you in the books is how you’re supposed to deal with the following two mutually exclusive things.
Thing #1: Always keep your puppy attached to you, in a confined small area, or in a crate.
Thing #2: While crate training, start with short sessions and work your way up to longer ones.
OK, I can do thing #2 I reckon. But during the times I can’t have her attached or with me, then what? Because you can’t just wait to stick her in the crate until you can have a nice controlled set of short sessions.
I’m glad, or at least hopeful, that puppies are resilient. Because I’m sure I’ll get something wrong and have to fix it later.
Arizona screamed like that for over two weeks straight. We had to give in at times and just sleep with her on the couch, so the other dogs and human could sleep. She is 9 months old now and still likes to tell us once in a while how she feels about being crated, but for the most part, she’s good about it.
As for taking your time with crate training, I’ve never really followed it. I wanted to, but as you mentioned, there are times when you can’t have the puppy attached to you, so in order to feel less stressed about it, I’d just put Arizona in the crate. One thing I did do to help her along with crate training was to put her into her crate whenever I thought she was ready for a nap. After a couple of weeks, we started to notice that from 9am until 12pm or so, Arizona would get sleepy, so we started putting her into her crate between 9:00 and 9:30am and then leaving her until we heard her start moving around, which always seemed to be 3 hours later. It got her into a really good schedule, giving us time to do our own stuff without worrying. It also got her ready for when I returned to school, now she’ll go into her crate at 9am and be completely quiet until my step-dad gets her out when he wakes up or feels like dealing with her.
Good luck with the puppy, she sounds adorable!
The upstairs crate, which is a plastic airline type, now has a couple boxes in the back, blocking pretty much the whole space, making it the perfect size. Of course, as I thought would happen, she’s shredded the front box up pretty nicely. Fortunately, all the shredding has been at the top, as she jumps up at it, and the box is holding its own. Sharon, the breeder, suggested just putting newspaper in half in case she had to go, but I’m afraid that that might delay the going outside part of house training, so I haven’t done that. The communal crate now has its included divider in it, making it quite small, though there’s still enough space in there for her to do something in the right end and hang out in the left end, as she has demonstrated a couple times today. The good news is that she has parked outside, including at least one #2. And no problem with feeling her back while she was “in the position” either. I swear, this dog will let me handle or manipulate her any way I want, up to and including carrying her around on her back.