There are some dog owners who believe that it's cool and inhumane to confine their pet while learning good house training behaviors. The problem is that they somehow equate crate training methods with caging their dog like… well, a dog.

The fact is that nothing could be farther from the truth. While potty training your pet using crate training methods may at first appear like caging the animal, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Confinement is not caging.
This IS CAGING and is NOT Crate Training!

Limiting the area where your puppy or dog can move about, until such time as they are reliably housetrained simply makes good sense.

It's interesting that some people have claimed that the above two statements concerning confinement and caging are nothing more than semantics. Consider, however, that parents of toddlers and very young children often limit the kids area where they may play in roam. It could be said that these parents are confining their children just to areas that are safe in their home.

This is Good Dog Willy in His Crate. See the Difference?

Confining your pet keeps your home safe from the destructive behaviors of that new puppy or adult dog until such time as they learn proper manners. You must ask, which is better, temporary confinement for effective training, or frustration attempts that may lead to giving up and making your pet and outside only dog?

To make matters worse, that frustration owners feel when house training is not going well can also result in raising your voice in a threatening manner, scolding and other nastiness including rubbing the animals nose in the accident.

All of these things that are borne out of frustration when housebreaking your dog results in your best friend becoming afraid or at least cautious of you. This is the absolute worst of all worlds. And to make matters worse, it doesn't help with the house training at all. If anything, it may make your dog go off and hide out of sight in other rooms of your home to go to the bathroom.

Here is a list of top 10 tips for house training a dog that you may be interested in reading. It's a good start to understand how the whole crate training/house training method works.

Bad behaviors of owners have done more damage to more dogs than almost anything else you can imagine. Crate training has the benefit of keeping your pup under control and limiting the opportunity to have bathroom accidents in your home.

Crate training also makes effective house training much easier because you can control when your dog goes out and offers many opportunities for you to praise them for a job well done. Far from being simply a cage, crate training helps your pet to quickly learn proper bathroom behaviors that can make them one of your closest friends for years.