our 14 month old lab pit mix loved his crate from 8 weeks until about month 8, then escalated from scratching to full jail break to chipping a canine on the wire crate we replaced last week, we are two weeks into a $340 aluminum heavy duty crate he refuses to enter at all, our new lease has a crate clause and i cant work from home, so i need honest people to tell me if this is adolescent brain chemistry, an anxiety problem wearing a crate costume, and whether going back to full puppy foundation at 14 months is actually a thing that works or something trainers say to be polite

Bruno is a 14 month old lab pit mix, 62 pounds, we got him from a foster at 8 weeks and did everything the puppy books said. crate by the bed the first two weeks, crate games with the door open, feeding in the crate, kong in the crate, calm nap raffle in the crate, the whole liturgy. he was, and i mean this, a poster child, we have iphone videos from month 4 through month 7 of him walking himself in for a nap unprompted, we sent them to our vet like proud parents. i want to establish this because every trainer we have talked to since month 9 has assumed we skipped a step and we did not, we ran the manual, the manual just quit working somewhere around his eight month birthday.

the timeline of the collapse. month 8, he started pawing at the door for the first thirty seconds every time and settling, we told ourselves adolescent, kept going. month 9, ninety seconds of pawing, one scraped nail. month 10 was the first real event, we came home from a 4 hour work stretch to a bent latch and a dog on the couch with a $600 chewed area rug and no injuries. month 11 we bought a nicer wire crate, month 12 he bent the door of that one too. our trainer at that point said stop practicing, let the crate cool off, run the settle protocol on a bed with a tether, we did that for two months and he was fine on the tether when we were home and could see him, and completely feral in a crate when we were not there, we tested it once with a camera and turned it off within 90 seconds because it was hard to watch. two weeks ago is the reason im writing, we tried a wire crate again for a 90 minute grocery run and he chipped his right upper canine on the wire pulling the door, $410 dental visit, no root exposed, we got lucky. i drove home from the vet and ordered the $340 impact resistant aluminum crate that comes up in every reddit thread about houdini dogs and he will not go into it, not for kibble, not for a bully stick, not for the frozen kong he would sell his soul for on a normal Tuesday. he sits three feet away and stares at it like a threat.

the piece that is making me actually panic. we just moved into a new apartment two months ago, i was leveraged up to get us into a place with a yard, our new lease has a specific crate clause, dog must be crated when unattended, this is not paranoia the property manager mentioned it on the walkthrough because the last tenants let a boxer chew a door frame. i cannot work from home, i am at a job site four days a week, my partner is fully in office. we have been paying $65 a day for a small daycare that liked him for the first three weeks and has now asked us not to bring him back because he started resource guarding a water bowl from another dog, which is a new sentence about our dog, not one he wrote at 6 months.

so honest crate people and adolescent dog people, please. 1. is this the famous 12 to 18 month brain chemistry rewire showing up specifically at the crate because thats where he has the least agency, or has this been a separation anxiety problem in a crate costume the whole time and we missed it. how do you actually tell those apart when the dog is fine with us physically home and awful when we arent. 2. is a heavy duty crate the answer or is that just capping the same problem, the aluminum one is genuinely inescapable but if the underlying issue is panic i feel like im buying a very expensive padded cell. 3. does going back to full puppy foundation, meals and naps in the crate with door open for weeks, actually work at 14 months on a dog with a chipped tooth memory of the wire, or is that trainer politeness for a case they know is already over. 4. and the ugly one, at what point does this stop being a crate training problem and start being a separation anxiety problem, because the daycare-out plus lease clause math is not survivable long term and i need to know if im at the "buy a better crate" fork or the "call a veterinary behaviorist" fork, the honest one, not the internet fluoxetine flame war one