09/10/2025
How to teach your puppy to hate the crate
It was all going well. We'd bought our gorgeous little spaniel puppy home on my lap, me bubbling with excitement at how amazing life with this little ball of fluff was going to be. We were going to get home, have some sofa cuddles, give him his dinner and then he would go into his crate and sleep through the night until we were ready to get up with him in the morning.
Bedtime rolls around, and we pop Duke into his crate for the first time and we shut the door behind him. Then we went to go to bed ourselves. But before we'd even got our PJs on, the barking started. We'd read the best thing to do was to let him 'cry it out', so we tried to just ignore him and hope he'd settle down soon.
But the barking didn't stop. It just went on and on and on. Duke got more and more distressed, and so did I. I tried going down and reassuring him, but as soon as I left the barking started again. He was frantic. Even though it felt wrong, I really thought I was doing the right thing by leaving him in that crate and hoping he would get used to it. After a couple of hours, I gave in and slept on the sofa, Duke curled up by my feet.
The next night, I was adamant that it would be better. So what did I do? The exact same thing, of course (I know, I know- 2025 me is nearly too embarrassed to write this story!) I put him in the crate, hoped he would be ok, he wasn't ok, I gave up after listening to him barking his little puppy head off for ages and we both ended up sleeping on the couch. We did this night after night for weeks. Did I change anything? No. Did Duke feel any better about the crate? No!
Eventually, I decided that the crate just wasn't going to work for him. I just put a bed on the floor on our bedroom floor and he slept soundly for the first time since we'd bought him home. For a while I thought that it was the crate itself that was the problem. Crates aren't a bad tool when you teach your puppy that it's a safe place for them. And that's where we went so wrong with Duke's crate. We never taught him that it was a safe place for him.
If you want to crate train your puppy, that's great. There's loads of great reasons to do so. But the really important thing to remember is that you have to train your puppy to be comfortable going in there, when you don't need them to go in there. And that principle is true for all the training you'll do with your pup for the rest of their life- you have to train for the moment, not in the moment.
Soon after that, we got rid of Duke's crate altogether and 7 years later, we've never looked back. He rests on a few different spots around the house and on the sofas. So if you want to crate train, great, go for it. But if it doesn't feel like the right thing for you and your pup, that's fine too. There really is no one size fits all with puppy training.