I have a 9 week old american bulldog puppy. Luckily, I'm home this
week but when I return to work, I don't know what to do with him. I
tried the crate and he yelps the whole time (he's too young to leave
in the crate for 4 hours at a time anyways) so I made up a spot in our
back hall with his crate, toys and water and put a gate up. But, he
yelps and cries and barks the entire time so LOUDLY! What do I do? How
do we gently get him used to this? I need to be able to leave him
alone for a few hours at a time. Help!

On May 2, 4:41 pm, wrote:
I have a 9 week old american bulldog puppy. Luckily, I'm home this
week but when I return to work, I don't know what to do with him. I
tried the crate and he yelps the whole time (he's too young to leave
in the crate for 4 hours at a time anyways) so I made up a spot in our
back hall with his crate, toys and water and put a gate up. But, he
yelps and cries and barks the entire time so LOUDLY! What do I do? How
do we gently get him used to this? I need to be able to leave him
alone for a few hours at a time. Help!

If you let him out of his crate when he whines and yelps, you are
rewarding and reinforcing that behavior. Hard as it is, you need to
wait till he's quiet, wait till he's been quiet for a few minutes, and
THEN reward him and let him out. Gradually increase the time he has to
be quiet to get the reward and get out. Find some SAFE toys he can
play with unsupervised in the crate, so that he's not bored out of his
mind while he's in there. (And awake; once he gets used to the crate,
he'll spend a good deal of the time sleeping.)

A two-month-old puppy should be able to manage three hours in the
crate; you need to have someone stop in to let him out, let him have
potty time and some human interaction at least that often. This length
of time, too, can be increased gradually--a rough rule of thumb is to
add 1 to the puppy's age in months to determine how many hours in the
crate he can handle.

Lis