Dog in a Box: The Story of Free vs. Crated Champ

Dog in a Box:

The Story of Free vs. Crated Champ

By Ray & Emma Lincoln

What really happens when a dog is home alone

Dog in a Box

By Ray & Emma Lincoln

Copyright 2012 by Ray & Emma Lincoln

Published by:

Awesome Book Publishing

P.O. Box 1157

Roseland, FL 32957

Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction. All names, places, institutions and incidents are either a product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person, locale, institution or incident is purely coincidental

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, written or electronic, without written permission from the authors and the publisher.

(Other Books by Ray & Emma Lincoln)

The Cure for useless Dog Syndrome

Dogs Hate Crates

Awesome Puppy

This book is dedicated to Anna;

wherever you are, may you always be free …

Introduction

How Do Dogs Feel About Crate Training?

In this book, we unveil the mystery of how a suburban dog, Champ, spends his time alone when his owners go to work, reconstructing what he’d experience each hour of a given day if he were crated vs. what he’d experience free in the home during those same hours. To bring this fictionalized story of the young dog and his family to life, we draw on true case studies, scientific research findings, and behavioral literature.

Research shows that excessive confinement during sensitive developmental periods damages dogs. This is especially true if pups have already suffered from a deprived environment at their breeder’s facility during their mother’s pregnancy and the puppies’ critical early weeks. In Dog in a Box, the two contrasting scenarios demonstrate how specific events in the home and in the crate over the course of 12 hours on an average workday affect a young dog’s mind, body, and behavior.

Have you ever stayed home with your dog and carefully observed him or her all day? Many owners never get this chance, while others may wonder how to interpret what they’ve observed. And many caring families, like Champ’s in this book, are left looking for guidance.

Trainers may warn loving owners not to anthropomorphize. But it’s a much worse error to underestimate your dog’s intelligence and emotions. It’s true that dogs communicate differently and live differently from the way humans do in many ways because they are a different species. But like us, dogs are social and sentient beings.

In other words, dogs do think! Unfortunately, starting hundreds of years ago, there has been

extensive scientific debate on whether dogs have conscious thought and awareness. In her book For the Love of a Dog, applied animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell describes infamous examples in which dogs were tortured in the name of science to try to demonstrate that they could not feel. And to this day, a number of scientists still don’t believe that dogs possess consciousness. Some don’t even believe that dogs have feelings!

In contrast, our professional opinion is that even though dogs may not communicate or think symbolically in the same way that people do, they certainly do have consciousness. Dogs can solve problems, they can remember outcomes from the past in order to decide whether to repeat behaviors, and they can make independent decisions. And they also feel responsibility and love.

Some studies indicate that dogs’ intelligence is equivalent to that of a human child between 3 and 5 years old. Also, your dog probably knows many more words than you think. It is not uncommon for dogs to have a testable vocabulary of 150 to 300 words, and many dogs can understand some of these words combined into unique sentences. This is quite remarkable since words are not dogs’ strongest language. In addition to understanding a number of human words, our dogs also have perfect intuition, or a sixth sense, which allows them to understand what we feel at any given moment. So, in many situations, dogs can essentially read our minds.

Along with surprisingly keen intelligence, dogs also possess extremely acute senses. If you leave a window open, your dog can smell you a mile away—literally—distinguishing your scent from everybody else’s. And he or she could easily find you if you were lost. But even more amazing is that you’d be the only person your dog would want to find. That kind of loyalty is pretty impressive in a world where many people run criminal background checks before going out for coffee with a new love interest and half of marriages break up within seven years. If you own large-breed dogs, you should know that they are probably strong enough to kill you easily. But instead, they would almost surely lay down their lives to protect you.

This is not just instinct. Even though dogs can’t express it verbally, they love their humans, and they certainly perceive them as family members. Your dog loves you and thinks about you a lot! Even if you went away for five years, your dog would still know you. And there’s no doubt that you are on your dog’s mind when you’re away at work.

For centuries, people have depended on dogs trained to perform highly complex series of tasks, sometimes completely independently and without supervision. Working dogs today include ancient flock guardian breeds, such as the Anatolian shepherds of Turkey, whose job is to protect their flocks of sheep by staying alone with them in the countryside for months at a time. Rescue breeds like St. Bernards can independently search out and assist avalanche victims. Therapy dogs of every breed cheer up delicate patients who require a gentle touch and who may not respond to anyone else. And some assistance dogs guide the blind, while others alert their owners to upcoming seizures or the sound of a ringing telephone.

So, considering all dogs’ mental abilities, there’s really no question whether they’ll notice if their owners lock them in a small cage when they leave for work or whether they’ll fear that their humans will do it to them again the next day.

According to the well-known theory of cognitive dissonance, based on the classic research of Leon Festinger, once people do something out of line with their own perception of themselves, they tend to look for a good reason for their actions and then defend this new line of thinking. Cognitive dissonance can explain why many dog parents who initially worried that crating was cruel started crating and then began to champion popular theories that seemed to justify their actions.

Currently popular theories that support crating include the concept that dogs love crates because they are den animals and pointing to the fact that dogs seem to sleep all day anyway. The concept of dogs as den animals is based on the life cycle of wolves. But wolf pups only live in dens—in the company of their littermates—for the first eight weeks of their lives or after giving birth to their own pups. And many experts who stress that dogs sleep all day have only observed crated dogs, who have no choice.

It is true that dogs do sleep more hours each day than humans because of their physiology and their manner of obtaining food and utilizing energy. And individual dogs’ sleep patterns also depend on their age, their breed, and how much they work or exercise.

If you carefully watch your dogs, you’ll notice that their sleep resembles naps. They sleep for 20 minutes and then stand or move around. Or they may be roused from sleep by a sound that they believe to be a danger to the family and respond by jumping up to check it out. Then they go back to sleep as though nothing had happened. Sleeping dogs stretch and turn frequently. And dogs often interrupt a nap to rise, walk to another room, or help themselves to a drink of water. They might even decide to play or run around for a minute or two. These movements and inquisitive behaviors are just as likely to happen during the night as during the day. And it’s not in dogs’ nature to sleep soundly for eight hours at a time.

Even though dogs sleep a lot during periods of downtime, they sleep much less under more demanding conditions. For example, a border collie who actively works on a ranch will not take much time to sleep during daytime hours when his or her owner needs the dog to herd sheep.

This pattern of adjusting the amount of sleep to the day’s demands resembles the lives of wolves in the wild. A dog is a sophisticated hunting animal who uses a great deal of mental energy planning and communicating with the pack while hunting and also expending tremendous physical energy. The actions of a dog can determine whether his or her family lives or dies, so a dog must always be in prime form.

For this reason, whenever dogs’ efforts are not needed, they rest to replenish their energy. Just like your dogs at home, wolves take little naps whenever it’s convenient. They may sleep for a while, then get up and stretch, go sniff at something interesting, or play with their pack mates for a moment or two. If it’s hot out, they may dig a shallow depression in