Barbara The Marathon Runner got some new running socks for Christmas, and she put them in a tidy little pile with some other presents. And then, magically, they disappeared.
Well, we’ve learned where to look when socks disappear — in Callie’s crate! Sure enough, that’s exactly where they were.
I love Callie’s attitude about her crate. She’s the first dog I’ve crate-trained, so I wasn’t sure what to expect after we met the basic goal of house-training her. That accomplished, Callie uses her crate a lot — voluntarily. Most of the time, the door is open, so she’s free to come and go. Sometimes, she’s fed in her crate, but not always. Her water dish, always full of fresh water, is in her crate. Frequently, she sleeps in her crate for part of the night, but not always; it’s her choice.
Maybe more important, many of her toys “live” in the crate. Callie doesn’t always put them there; sometimes we do. But many times during a day, Callie walks into her crate, selects a toy, and carries it in her mouth to another part of the house. It’s fun to try to figure out why she chooses a particular toy. In the case of “Stinky,” her stuffed doggie security object, it’s obvious. She retrieves Stinky every night before bedtime, so she can suck on it and “wind down.”
So maybe it’s not surprising that, when Callie finds a wayward pair of socks, they end up in her crate. I think it’s cool that she feels some sense of ownership toward her crate. She probably thinks “a dog’s crate is its castle,” so that it should be off-limits to humans. And we generally respect that, except when it comes to missing running socks.
