The German Shepherd breed is a highly playful breed and can be a good trainee. Crate training is not just an essential part of house training, but also helpful in traveling. A puppy having a crate of itself will make it feel a sense of belongingness. But the basic question that strikes in mind can be how to crate train a German Shepherd puppy?
Well, everything is possible if you do it with dedication.
What is the Crate Training?
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Crate training is the training provided to a pet to accept the cage as a familiar and safe place to stay in. don’t think that it’s a cruel thing. Crate training can be a cruel thing if treated as punishment for a dog. The first thing to keep in mind is that you never treat your crate as a punishment room for your dog. As it is said, a crate is not a puppy prison.
A good crate training for your German Shepherd puppy is to make your dog love its crate. The dog should love the crate as its tiny home and should spend personal, relaxing, and cozy time in it. This training can be frustrating and time involving activity but will provide you with the desired results in the end.
The Benefits of Crate Training
Let us go through some of the best benefits for crate trained puppy:-
- Secure place: the crate needs to make your puppy safe and secure in it. Dogs do require their space, and the crate should be a place of comfort for it.
- The poop training: a puppy doesn’t like to poop in the same place where they spend quality time with many comforts. Being in a crate, the puppy will make you alert about when it wants to poop and get trained about how they need to perform when they want to come out of a crate.
- Transportation friendly: puppy once appointed, can be the part of your family you cant leave it at home when you travel, so to cure this problem, one must provide crate training to the puppy so that traveling is made easy for them.
- Protect your items: German Shepherd Puppy loves to chew. They can chew your furniture, carpet, toys, clothes, or any other thing to make all these items of your house safe, one should learn How to Crate Train a German Shepherd Puppy.
- Sanitization training for free: Crate Training provides the best part to you that is sanitization. As told earlier, puppies don’t poop on the place they live comfortably in this why they get a poop training along with crate training.
Types of Crates
Wire, plastic, or fabric are the most common dog crates found. They can also be foldable for transportation or storing purposes. Let us have a look through all of three:
- Plastic Crates- plastic crates are travel friendly as they have solid corners and can make your puppy comfortable but can be harder to clean and maintain the sanitization.
- Wire crates- Being well-ventilated wire crates are the favorite for your puppy, and you as they are easy to maintain the sanitization, but one should keep it in mind that they can be heavy as you increase the size.
- Fabric crates: fabric crates are the lightest among all the others and a blessing for travels. Being easy to store, they take a merely low space. The only problem is that they are not much durable and can be destroyed by a puppy.
What Materials Do you Need For Crate Training?
A crate is an obvious thing that you will require for crate training, but what else? To answer this question, let us go through some other things that are required along with cratecrate to train your puppy:
- Bedding and comforter: A puppy will only adapt the crate when it feels comfortable in it. One should keep in mind that the German shepherd puppy is chewing friendly and doesn’t go for much fluffy bedding but goes for something that is much durable. A thinner mat for the crate can be a perfect option, which is softer but not fluffy.
- Something to do: German shepherd is a playful dog and will only adapt a Crate if it will find something for playing in the crate. A toy would help you out; a toy will help your puppy to pass the time inside the crate and enjoy the time.
- Treats or rewards: a puppy will require a reward to perform any of your activities, keep your hand full of treats if you want them to train according to your choice.
- Covers: covers will make your dog feel safe, and the dog will not notice the passing by of any human. You can either purchase a crate cover or use a towel or any cloth.
How to Crate Train a German Shepherd Puppy
The important part that will do your work after that easy is to treat your puppy to love the crate. The crate needs to be a comforting place, and the puppies own home sweet home. Don’t expect much too fast and go for the instructions as mentioned below:
- Introduce the crate to the puppy and examine crate as it wants to. The puppy may go in and come out several times and may also sniff around the crate but don’t panic. Provide it with some toys and food near the crate so that he adapts that place for playing.
- Once you feel that the puppy is comfortable to be around the crate and sitting on the mate, introduce food around that place. Start with offering food near to the crate and then slowly inside the crate.
- While the dog is enjoying inside, start closing the crate gate slowly.
- By this, the puppy can be happy with the crate and is ready to leave alone at home.
- Trying to create the puppy overnight, give your dog a chance to poop before sleep.
Crate Training Schedule
Basic schedules that you may follow can be:
- Waking up in the morning, poop time, breakfast, and playtime and crate time.
- Noon out for potty, playtime, and back to the crate
- Only playtime and poop time in the evening.
- The last potty breaks before bedtime and crate time till morning.
