Hello, this is Talking Dogs and I'm Graham Hall. I've spent close to 15 years now training dogs and training owners in how to train their dogs, which has earned me the name the dog father.

Now, you might have spotted me on television's dogs behaving very badly,

or you might have read one of my books.

Now, this podcast is the place where you can tell me about your dog,

and more specifically, you can ask me questions about why your dog behaves the way they do.

Now, no problem is too big or too small, and I can promise you somebody else out there is having exactly the same trouble as you.

Well a lot of us are back to a bit more normal life right now. Well that's normal in quotation marks.

Now that might mean leaving the house

and therefore your dog to go to work or it might mean just needing to get a full days working at

home without the dog distracting you every five minutes. So today I want to talk about how to get

your dog to settle by themselves in a couple of different scenarios. I've had an email from Megan.

She says, we've got a 16-month-old working black Labrador called Louis.

He's a lovely sweet, intelligent boy, and we adore him.

However, he's very strong and full of nervous energy.

He won't settle in the house.

He was successfully crate trained from early on,

and he will happily sleep and rest in his crates in the hallway most of the house. He was successfully crate train from early on and he will happily sleep and rest

in his crates in the hallway most of the day. But if we let him out of the crate, he'll mostly

just roam around the house trying to get our attention, pinching things off the side to chew

or stand staring at his whining. So we end up putting him back in his crate because he just gets

so annoying. Now occasionally he'll lie on his special rug, but he's not really relaxed.

He's still staring at you're waiting for something to happen.

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