Should I Build Or Buy My Puppy Pen?

 

Your puppy's first weeks and months, and how you handle discipline and affection, are critical to the way your dog's personality develops. With our busy modern lifestyles, though, it really isn't practical to take 6 weeks off work just to train your new puppy! This means that you need all the tools and techniques you can get to help train your puppy right in the early weeks... and this is where puppy play pens come in. As den animals, dogs and puppies are quite comfortable with the enclosed space that a puppy pen provides, and as long as they can see the other members of their 'pack' (you!), they'll be happy. Then the major question becomes - should you build or buy your puppy pen? Today we check out the different considerations.

1. Shape of your pen

Most commercial puppy pens are made with a hinged design, so that they can be folded out or in to create different shapes. Some of the top quality models are made with an eight-panel design, to create either an octagon, a square with two-panel sides, or a rectangle with two one-panel sides and two 3-panel sides.

This helps prevent boredom for your puppy, as well as making it easier for you to move the pen around the house, and fit it into tighter spaces and around your furniture. Remember that puppy pens are not designed to hold your puppy when you aren't in the room with them (that's what dog cages are for), so you should be moving the puppy pen as you move round the house!

The hinged design is quite difficult to DIY!

2. Folding pens

If your puppy pen can be folded away, it is far more likely to be used! Again, it is fairly difficult to build your own puppy pen that can be folded away with ease... and quite a bit more costly.

3. Cost savings!

Unless you're very handy and have access to cheap or scrap materials, it is quite easy to spend more on the materials for a pen than you would have spent on simply purchasing a ready-made one! This is because economies of scale make it cheaper for factories to buy materials and assemble them in bulk.

4. Safety

You can't tell by looking at it, but quite a lot of thought, experimentation and observation have gone into designing puppy pens so that they are safe for your pets! I once knew a dog that used to jump up and do a type of high jump-roll over the side of his outside pen... until one day he jumped up and nearly made it over, but his collar caught on the spikes on the fence and he tragically hung himself. There are actually dozens of safety risks like that lurking for puppies in different places, and a commercial pen is designed to avoid all of those.

A puppy pen is a must... but thankfully it is cheaper, faster, more convenient and much safer to just buy one rather than trying to build your own!