gobronco
Active member
I know you're great bulldog owners and it is so obvious that you treat baby Wesley very well, so please don't get me wrong: I just wonder why making the cage an enjoyable place and why making him sleep in a cage? Can he not sleep in a little bed next to your bed and have his meals in the kitchen from start?
I am very interested in cultural differences, and caging is such an interesting example of how countries/cultures that overall are quite similar still approach a particular issue in opposite ways: whereas many dogs in the UK and in the US, for instance, are caged, this is against the law in Sweden (and also Finland, I believe). Here, dogs may not be caged unless they are travelling. In cars, on the other hand, they are common as the law stipulates that dogs must be confined when riding a car. So Castor has a big cage in the back of our car (and we have to have a big car because of this) but it would be against the law having him in that cage in our house.
Crate training at night, when they are young, can really help with potty training. They don't like going to the bathroom where they sleep. If they are crate trained right away they don't see it as a jail. A couple of our dogs would go to the crate when they were ready for bed every night even if it wasn't bedtime for us. Bruno the rescue dog slept in a crate for the first couple of months and would go and sleep in it, with the door open, throughout the day. It was a safe place for him. We stopped leaving the crate door open during the day because he kept pretending he is an alligator and killing the crate pad. He now sleeps on the couch. Time to break down the crate and put it in the shed. Hopefully for a long time.