If you follow my personal page, you know we had a rough rough week. Turned out Athena didn’t just have a stomach bug but rather a blockage that required emergency surgery Wednesday.
However. Because you can find a teachable moment in just about everything, I’m going to spin this negative into a positive.
With a surgery such as the one Athena went through, she obviously had to spend the night at the hospital and will be on restricted activity for at least the next 2 weeks until her staples come out. While this is pretty stressful, it had the potential to be 10x more stressful if Athena wasn’t crate trained or well versed in the art of calm. Take this as another thing you don’t think about when you bring a new puppy or dog home. We aren’t planning for something like this to happen so you don’t think about the impact that having a dog that can be safely crated will have until your dog has to have an overnight stay at the hospital and now has to be drugged in order to remain calm. You can easily avoid this situation by making the effort to crate train your dog and continue to utilize the crate throughout their life.
With that said, please stop thinking the crate is some horrible torture chamber. These are exactly the moments we don’t think about and come to regret because we had that preconceived notion that crates are bad. The crate just might be your best friend in times of crisis.
Lady & The Leash K9 Training 