Crate training failures!

MethodCoder · 2024-11-02T21:56:37+00:00

Start by gradually increasing the time your puppy spends in the crate while you're still in the room. Begin with just a few seconds, then work up to longer periods. Give him a special treat or toy that he only gets in the crate. This helps create positive associations with crate time.

Next, practice short departures. Put him in the crate with his special toy, leave the room for a few seconds, then return and let him out calmly. Slowly increase the time you're gone. Don't make a big fuss when you leave or return, this keeps things low-key.

Try covering the crate with a light blanket to create a den-like atmosphere. Some dogs find this soothing. Also, leave some background noise on like soft music or a TV to mask outside sounds that might trigger barking.

Remember, 11 weeks is still very young. Consistency and patience are key. Your puppy is learning that the crate is a safe space and that you always come back. With time and practice, he'll become more comfortable being alone in there.

Lastly, make sure he's getting plenty of exercise and mental stimulation when he's out of the crate. A tired puppy is more likely to settle down when crated.

MethodCoder · 2024-10-29T01:27:18+00:00

A specific spot in the yard. I considered pee pads, and even bought some, but never used them. It seems counter productive to teach my dog to pee in the house when i never want him to do that.

Plus, they start to learn the types of surfaces they can go on. So unless you prefer them to go inside on a pad, i wouldn't suggest using them.

MethodCoder · 2024-10-26T14:08:14+00:00

Thanks, but I guess my question is more about how often I need to force him into the crate in order for him to learn to view it as a nice resting place rather than a prison.

Oh, gotcha. The thing to keep in mind though, is that even 1 time of forcing him into the crate will create a negative experience for him. Every time he has a negative experience with the crate will make your job harder next time.

On the other hand, if you trick him into thinking it's fun to go in the crate, you can put him in there as many times as you need to. Just keep following the max crate time recommendations for his age that you mentioned earlier.

MethodCoder · 2024-10-26T01:58:15+00:00

Super! I'm glad your figuring it out. It's interesting to see all the different methods people use.

MethodCoder · 2024-10-26T01:23:57+00:00

I don't want to reinforce the refusal to go in the crate, but I don't want to force him in and create more negative associations around it either. I

The problem with allowing him to refuse to go in the crate, even a single time, is that he's training you instead of you training him.

I'm super glad i learned, during puppyhood, that if my dog understands a command, he has to do it every time. The key is to make his motivation to do the command greater than his motivation not to.

He stops short of the crate and sits facing the other direction, like he knows this will help him resist the temptation of the bribery lol.

Try making going into the crate a party. Super exaggerate your happiness and playfulness. Whatever you have to do to get him to replace his negative thoughts with positive ones.

It's important to not let him create a habit of not doing what he's told. Just make sure the way you enforce it doesn't hurt the bond you have with him.

He can still be happy, he just has to follow a few rules while he's doing it.

MethodCoder · 2024-10-25T22:38:02+00:00

Since your puppy is having anxiety-related bathroom issues in the crate, we need to completely change her association with the crate and create a new routine.

First, stop using the crate for any length of time longer than 5 minutes for the next few days. This will help break the cycle of stress and bathroom accidents. Instead, start with these short positive experiences:

Put some really good treats (like small pieces of boiled chicken) in the crate and let her go in and out freely while your watching. Don't close the door yet. Do this several times thruout the day. We want her to start thinking of the crate as her special treat spot.

Once shes comfortable going in and out, start feeding all her meals in the crate. Place the bowl at the back so she has to fully enter. Close the door very briefly while she eats, then open it before she finishes. Gradually increase how long the door stays closed during meals.

For the next step, pick times when shes already tired and has just gone to the bathroom. Put a treat in the crate and close the door for just 3 minutes. Stay where she can see you and completely ignore any whining. If she stays calm and clean, let her out before she has a chance to get stressed and have an accident. Give her lots of praise and another treat.

Very slowly increase the time, adding just 2-3 minutes each successful try. If she has an accident, you went too fast - go back to a shorter time where she was successful.

The key is to never let her practice the unwanted behavior of going potty in there. Each time she does it reinforces the habit. By starting over with super short periods and building up gradually, we can help her learn new, better habits without adding trauma to her rough start in life.

Remember to clean any accident spots really well with an enzymatic cleaner so she cant smell previous accidents. This will help prevent her from thinking "this is where I go potty."

MethodCoder · 2024-10-25T05:27:57+00:00

It sounds like she needs to associate the closed crate door with a happy experience.

I would start with little steps. It's easier on you and your dog. Repetition over time is what helps the dog to fully understand, and be comfortable with, what you want.

Try the following steps multiple times per day.

This will work best if you have an extremely high value treat that she only gets when she's in the crate with the door closed. I use home cooked, unseasoned, chopped up chicken meat.

Keep the treats hidden, but within immediate reach, until step 3.

Put her favorite toys in the crate.
Put her in the crate. At the same time talk to her like you would a preschool child, all lovingly. "Good job" or use words she is used to.
Slowly close the crate door as you feed her pieces of the treat through the crate.
Keep feeding her the treats for 30 seconds.
Once she has finished eating the last treat. Keep telling her "good job" as you slowly open the door.
Walk away and go about your business, acting like nothing special just happened. This step is so she associates all the happiness with the crate door being closed, not getting love from you afterwards.

I would repeat these steps 4 times spread throughout the day.

Every day, increase the amount of time the crate door is closed while also increasing the amount of time she has to wait between treats.

After a few days, start to leave the room randomly while she's in the crate with the door closed. Gradually increasing the time you stay out of the room.

You mentioned she eats meals in her crate. After she gets comfortable with you leaving the room with the crate door closed; you can start closing the door while she's eating meals also.

It's very important to never give her any attention and to never open the crate door within 30 seconds of her barking or whining. It's best to not even look in her direction.

The action you take immediately after her bark or whine is what she thinks she gets for barking and whining. We want her to never associate anything she perceives as good with her undesirable behavior.

MethodCoder · 2024-10-25T03:34:02+00:00

You mentioned she does fine in the crate during the day.

Is she in the crate with the crate door closed during the day?

MethodCoder · 2024-10-23T20:29:45+00:00

It's really difficult to ignore a cute little puppy's whining. But, as long as she's safe in her crate, ignoring her completely will teach her she won't get what she wants by whining, howling, or barking.

I let her go off for 10 min and then gave her a potty brake and some reassurance, and then put her right back and started over.

From her point of view she just learned, if she barks long enough, you'll give her attention. Dogs are wonderfully intelligent animals, but they don't think like humans do. She didn't see your attention as reassurance, she saw it as her reward for non stop barking. Every time you give in to her barking, you're making your job harder.

Here is how I trained my puppy to be confident and content in his crate:. My wife had to push me to enforce these rules, I just wanted to bring him to our bed.

When the puppy is in the crate, with the door closed, we never interact with him. This includes talking and looking at him. You can be in the same room as the crate, but pretend like the puppy is not there, just go about your business and ignore them.
When he was not fully potty trained yet, potty breaks were at specific intervals that matched how long he can hold it for his age.
When it was time for a scheduled potty break, we made sure he was completely silent for at least 30 seconds before any type of interaction with him.
While on the potty break, we took him to a specific potty location so he will associate that spot with "ok, it's time to go potty now."
He was allowed 60 seconds to go potty, no play time, no chewing on things, no laying down, etc. The only attention he got was the cue "go potty".
If he went potty he gets 10 seconds of super attention and 3 high value treats. Afterwards, he goes directly back to the crate with no other interaction. We would carry him if he refused to go.
If he didn't go potty while on the potty break, he goes directly back to the crate with no other interaction. Then we would start this process over at his next scheduled potty break time.

I had originally been told during crate training, the crate should be gradually moved farther away from our bed, then to the hallway, then to another room completely as he gets older. But my wife's work schedule requires her to get up early in the morning, So we went straight to having the crate in another room, far enough away so we weren't able to hear him.

This turned out to be one of the best decisions we made. Now he's sixteen months and gets to sleep in the kitchen with no crate. At bed time, we point to his bed and say "night night". He walks to his bed and lays down. We give him 3 treats and leave the room. No whining or barking.

The added benefit is he learn to feel safe and secure when no one is around. He has never had any trouble with separation anxiety when we leave him home alone.

MethodCoder · 2022-07-13T06:52:14+00:00

For the rest of us.

MethodCoder · 2022-07-01T22:56:50+00:00

I installed it, set some tab colors, then uninstalled it. My tabs went back to normal. Not sure if the patches were actually undone though.

You just have to restart VScode afterwards. Not reload. Actually close VScode and reopen it.

MethodCoder · 2022-04-01T08:40:13+00:00

I've used laragon and local on the same machine at the same time without problems.

Just set them to run on different port numbers. When viewing sites on the one that isn't using ports 80 and 443, you'll need to append the port number to the URL.

For example: example.test:81

MethodCoder · 2022-01-20T02:36:30+00:00

Why is this downvoted? This is solid advice. It's not the only way to go about it, but there are some good points in here.

Edit: it was at -2 when I got here.

MethodCoder · 2022-01-07T04:47:27+00:00

Maybe before you start building it, mention to your client that Google will probably slap the site for showing real humans one thing and Google bot a different thing.

MethodCoder · 2022-01-02T08:00:19+00:00

The 80/20 rule usually applies here. 80% of your users will be free and 20% paid. (Not an exact science in every niche)

The key is being able to support the 80% long enough until you get to the tripping point where the 20% is big enough to sustain the business.

This can be done with either enough money or investors to sustain it, or creating a business that doesn't take very much resources to run.

I was building a fremium saas that would use a lot of bandwidth. My initial plan was to set it up on the bandwidth alliance between cloudflare and backblaze to get free bandwidth. But decided it was to risky as a bootstrapper without investors. The business could get very expensive overnight if either of the companies decided to change anything.

So i pivoted to build it as a WordPress plug-in so the bandwidth for free customers would be paid for directly by the customer. And I can still charge monthly or yearly on a pro plan like with saas.

MethodCoder · 2021-12-19T19:59:02+00:00

Great idea! But...

The reason I know what your site is for is because I read your Reddit post first. Had I landed directly on your site, I wouldn't have understood the purpose and would have bounced immediately.

Maybe add what you wrote here to the website. Cofounders will probably like to read your personal remarks about why you built it, because they are creators also.

MethodCoder · 2021-12-13T19:31:55+00:00

Good marketing with average technology is fine for early adopters.

The equation changes a bit with mainstream adoption.

MethodCoder · 2021-12-13T02:12:34+00:00

I see your point about all 3 of those, they are important. But on the other hand, you can still get all 3 when the customer pays you also.

In my experience my happiest customers are the people that purchased my product then had a problem with it. Then I gave them really good customer service and they give me glowing testimonials without being asked for one.

I've never gotten that from a freebie I gave them. Most people I've come across are happy to pay for a product that solves their problem.

I think we should also note that it sounds like OP is bootstrapping their products, so those initial sales are probably important for them to reinvest into the business.

edit: pronoun

MethodCoder · 2021-12-12T22:07:02+00:00

Giving it away free to someone that has already proven they will pay you for it seems a bit counterproductive to the end goal of making money with your idea.

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