Would love to hear some opinions on this topic.
Excerpt from "The Dish by Darcy"
To crate or not to crate? | The Dish by Darcie
Dogs are not pack animals.
Dogs, left on their own, might hook up with another dog now and then but it doesn’t last. I know it’s a popular myth made up by some people to sell certain forms of training to the mass public but it’s just not true. Dogs like the company of other beings as long as there is food to eat and learn to live with others but they don’t have to live that way to be happy and healthy if they have enough food to eat on their own. More often than not, wild dogs and those who have run away from home or have gotten lost, stay on their own. Dogs are more like us in this respect….we don’t have to constantly have another person or more than one person, or dog, around us moving in the same direction to be happy, safe or contented. That lifestyle would kill me and my dogs, I like my alone quiet time, they like their alone quiet time. All of us, including the dogs, need some alone time. If we don’t get that, if there is always someone else near us, touching us, talking to us, even breathing in the same room all the time, we become truly dependent on that. It’s not healthy. It’s one of the ways that separation anxiety starts and that is a terrible, awful thing which can be very hard to fix. There will be an emergency some day and we may have to leave our dogs for a little while, they should be calm and quiet, sleeping and restful until we return. That is peace.
Don’t believe that your dogs aren’t pack animals? Go out into some deserted place with your dogs for an extended period of time, say 30 days. Without food. How long will the dogs stay with you if you’re not feeding them? Will they hunt and feed the food to you? If you’re really the real leader of the pack, of course they would. They won’t. You’re not fast enough or strong enough to be the leader of dogs under those circumstances. Dogs don’t have pack leaders. Wolves pack, dogs don’t.
People are not dog pack leaders, no matter how much you train and insist that the dogs obey you. You will never be a “pack leader” without fail unless it’s under a controlled experiment like inside houses with doors, yards with fences, and collars with leashes. We teach our dogs that life is good with us, we bond with them the best that we can and we keep them corralled. Yes, there are dogs, I’ve had them, that would rather come with me than do anything else but we all know when we get back home, we’ll have some dinner that I put together.
If all is well and we don’t have to go out into the forest to fend for ourselves, the dogs will probably still keep coming back to the door to be let in to get petted and fed. Personally I like it that way and hope that my dogs and I never have to go out into the wild to make a living like that. I’d miss them when they take off on their own to find something to eat…leaving me behind. – Darcie