The Puppy Apartment

The Puppy Apartment

7.08.2012

Puppy training for Chloe.

Educating myself in the art of puppy training, I soon learned that crating a dog was essential to their upbringing. That set me searching for Chloe's ideal crate over the Internet. Selecting the proper crate is primarily dependent on the size of the dog and for a cocker spaniel puppy that measured 8 inches at the shoulders and 12 inches in length, meant that her first crate could be on the small size. In the end, Chloe's first crate was in fact a hand-me-down from my parents that initially had used it to house their small Maltese. This crate was to become Chloe's primary sleeping quarters only, and we located it in our bedroom in order to keep an eye on her at night.

To house Chloe during the day, I had also investigated and purchased what I thought would be the perfect solution, a perimeter fenced pen that would allow her to roam around without the confines of a crate enclosure. I also thought that an open pen would remind her of her former kennel and make her feel more at home in her new surroundings.

Selecting our seldom used breakfast area which also just happened to have a tile floor, I decided that this would be the location for Chloe's daytime living. After ordering a wooden pet fence from Amazon, the complete enclosure was quickly installed and it looked like a matching piece to our other furniture throughout the house. Everyone that saw the set-up remarked how wonderful it looked, and wouldn't Chloe have a great place to stay during the day.

So what did Chloe think of her new digs? In three words, ...she hated it! Her first instinct was an attempt at making a jailbreak from the enclosure, while all the time howling at the top of her lungs. Nothing that we tried would calm her down and we soon learned that the open pen experiment was not the solution for her daytime quarters.One of the things that you quickly learn when training a puppy is to become flexible in your approach. If one method doesn't show results, try another until you achieve the desired goal, and this was the case with Chloe's daytime space.

As part of the pen enclosure I had also purchased a new larger crate called the "Puppy Apartment", which combined a unique sleeping compartment with a separate potty compartment. Seeing this on the Internet, I thought it would make a great solution, since not only would Chloe have a place to sleep during the day, but she could have her bathroom space close by, ...and she would learn where to do her business, or so that was the claim of the manufacturer known as "Modern Puppies" (www.puppyapartment.com).

With the open pen enclosure abandoned, and the fence shipped back to Amazon, we placed Chloe in her new Puppy Apartment for the first time. Coming home at noon time from work that day, I was anxious to see how she liked her apartment after just 3 hours of use. What I found was the pee pad that sat on the bathroom compartment's floor torn into a million pieces. It literally looked like someone had let a bomb off on the pad.

  The Puppy Apartment 
(Courtesy of Modern Puppies)

As I said earlier, you learn to become flexible in your approach to puppy training, and while she accepted the Puppy Apartment enclosure as her daytime crate, she never did accept the idea of the adjacent toilet, and a box containing over 100 new pee pads that were going to be used in potty training Chloe, was eventually given away to a needy dog.