my dog forest: The Crate Escape

Yesterday's blog post was getting kinda long, so I decided to post this crate story separately.

Rewind to the first week we owned Forest. Before I discovered the fantastic world of doggy day care, Forest spent 8am to 5pm at home in his crate, which forced Nick and I to rush back to the house a couple times a day to let him out (little puppy = little bladder).

One day I let Forest out in the morning, put him in his crate and sped back to work. A few hours later, I get a call from Nick who asks, “So how sure are you that you closed his crate door?" which is just a smartass question because of course I’m going to say, well hell, I’m pretty sure. Nick proceeds to tell me about how he came home and found the crate door wide open, a couple shoes with canine slobber on them, some nibbled chair legs and a very happy puppy in the kitchen. At the time I was positive that I had closed the crate door, but then I started thinking, well hell, I was in a hurry to get back to work, maybe I thought I closed the door but didn’t secure the latch properly? I spent the next 5 minutes worrying and apologizing while Nick hunted thru the house in search of hidden puppy poop (we’re still surprised Forest didn’t take a dump behind a dresser or in a closet).

The very next day, I left work to let Forest out, walked in the front door and called Nick. “So guess who I just found in the kitchen?” (next to destroyed chew toy and puddle of piss). Yep, the puppy was out again. Thankfully this time Nick was the last person to “close” the crate door so my claim of not being an irresponsible, ditzy dog owner was validated (which I reminded Nick of, oh, just a couple of times).

Our hypothesis is that Forest hates being left alone in his crate so much that he scratches, bites and jumps on the crate door hard enough and long enough to jimmy the latch loose. Then it’s party time for puppy.

So we’ve come up with the following solution: