Glory’s puppies are having fun play and exploring, but they also have “work” to do. What kind of “work”? Well, they are working on crate training and other important puppy stuff. 😉

When puppies move into the biggest puppy pen we have room for a crate. So they start sleeping in the crate (with the door open) at around five weeks of age.

When I go up in the morning to clean and feed, I put their food in the crate and close the door while I clean their puppy pen and litter boxes. This is their first “taste” of being closed in a crate as a group.

As they grew and matured, I started splitting them up a bit more for meals. First it was three puppies in a crate. And then it was two puppies per crate.

Then we finally went to each puppy in their own crate.

It’s hard to tell because the crate bottoms are black, but their are six puppies in six crates in this picture.

They weren’t really happy about being alone in their own crate so there was a bit more “complaining” than usual. But I just ignored it and left for about thirty minutes. When I came back they were all chilled out.

When I opened the doors to let them out, Bentley was like, “What? I was napping?”

Usually after your puppy has a meal, wakes up from a nap or sleep, or after a play session are the perfect times to take them outside to potty.

Well, there was no way I could gather all these guys and haul them downstairs and out the door (beside it’s muddy/snowy out the back door) to potty real quick. So I put all the litter boxes together and surrounded it by the exercise pen as a potty area.

Another thing we’ve worked on is adding something yummy to their dish while they are eating. This is the beginning of preventing resource guarding. Here is another post I wrote in more detail about it. https://pinewoodcavapoos.com/training/resource-guardingits-mine/

And now for some playtime!

They are such good puppies! And so stinkin’ cute!