Reply To: Time spent in crate

[jesse mcclure]

**Eric**, including the overnight time sounds right. The *average* time spent in a crate is under 2 hours, but the average (as arithmetic mean) is not the best representation of these data as they do not follow a normal “bell curve” distribution. Many dogs have more than 8 hours per day in a crate for that question – and there is a very large overlap with these dogs and those dogs who are said to sleep in a crate. It just turns out that only about 10% of our dogs sleep in a crate overnight, so those ~8 hours for all those dogs doesn’t have a huge impact on the overall average. In otherwords the “average” is about 2 hours, but this is because around 10% of our dogs spend 10 or so hours a day in a crate because they sleep there, while many others are rarely or never crated at all.

On a related metric, a vast majority of dogs listed as sleeping in a crate overnight also have 8 or more hours per day in a crate – so most of our participants are answering that question in the same way you did. There do seem to be some exceptions, but that should not matter in the long run.

**Andrea**, I think that could just as well be counted as crate time or not as crate time. So it should be fine as is.