We have a nearly 9-month-old whippet who’s been a dream with his crate from day one and genuinely likes his space. He now consistently has no accidents, and shows no destructive behaviour. Lately, we’ve felt he’s ready for a bit more freedom, so we’ve started the transition from a closed crate to an open crate where he can roam if he wants.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve been building up his daytime freedom when we leave the house – starting small and gradually working up to a couple of hours. He seems totally comfortable and mostly just sleeps. So, feeling confident, we tried leaving his crate open at night to see if he’d like to come out (first night last night). It didn’t go as well as we’d hoped. As an FYI the crate is and always has been in the living room and we have a baby gate to restrict access to the rest of the house.
We watched on the camera, and he did come out – he happily jumped on the sofa and slept there for about three hours. But after that, he started looking around, and then began whining quite loudly. We have Alexa set up to notify us of any crying, so we went down after a short while to see if it would stop. We go down and settle him, and he walked himself back into his crate. We closed the crate, and he didn’t make another peep all night. He didn’t need the toilet, so he wasn’t crying to be let out.
To be clear – our puppy loves his crate and has no issues with confinement. This isn’t about getting him to accept the crate; he’s already there, and sleeps about 8 hours uninterrupted. The problem is that now when he has the option to leave it overnight, he eventually gets restless and vocal. A search of the group turned up mostly initial crate training advice, but not much on this specific transition phase.
If you’ve successfully made this jump with a whippet (or any dog who loved their crate), I’d love to hear your experience. I want to make sure his next night out isn’t a stressful one for him. On the flip side, I’m also open to hearing why it might be a bad idea.
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TL;DR: Our 9mo whippet loves his crate, but when we left it open at night he slept on the sofa for 3 hours then started whining until we settled him and he went back into his closed crate. Looking for advice on how to transition to open crate at night without the middle-of-the-night distress.