Question for you dog owners

[lostt1]

So I just have a quick question for those of you who have dogs and work full-time. Do you use a crate for your pup during the day? Do you hire someone to come let him/her out during the day? Do you run home during a lunch break? I am asking because I will probably be adopting a 7 month maltipoo on Tuesday. She has been crate-trained and would

Comments

[ashley]

Hi. First, yay dogs!

I currently don't have my dog confined at all while I'm gone. He just has the whole apartment to walk around and I've done that for the past few years. Basically, when I got robbed, I ended up not having any way to confine him and then he did fine with that, so I never bothered doing it again.

But he was crate trained in the beginning or confined to certain places and that worked well. By the time I started leaving him out all the time, he was over five years old, so that made a difference, I'm sure.

Depending on the dog and your apartment layout, you might be able to find a middle ground. In the first apartment, we ended up putting up a baby gate to confine him to the kitchen while we were gone. So then he had a larger space than a crate to run around, but he was away from stuff he might crew up and he could have food and water all the time. In the second apartment, we had a giant bathroom, so we'd keep him in there. Same idea. Lots of space to run around, but no access to chew all the electrical cords.

During most of this time, we had 9-6/7pm type schedules with no way to go home and he was fine.

Eventually with age, he learned to only chew on his toys, so now he doesn't chew stuff even if I leave it on the floor. Which is good because now my schedule is shot to hell. But I walk him before work and after I get home and usually he's totally fine. It really depends on the dog, but they get used to a schedule either way. I really recommend trying to figure out some kind of middle ground if he'd end up in the crate a lot of the day and night. Blocking off your kitchen if you don't have stuff near the floor might not be too difficult.