Raised Kennels for Dummy Dog Owners

raised kennel with poop board

We've watched with some amusement as the people at Leaf Group (the erstwhile Demand Media Studios) have been migrating much of their eHow.com content into niche sites. We'll be kind and not call the process "FUBARed," even though it is. One problem that's developed is that they're taking poor-quality content and... well, they're making it worse. We found a new niche site, Cuteness.com, and a new DotD in one pass: Scott Mytyk wrote the eHow post "How to Build an Off the Ground Dog Kennel," which was bad enough in the original, but Leaf made it worse in migrating it to Cuteness...

Leaf made it worse by leaving out the materials list; but the instructions were already 1) ambiguous and 2) sloppy. Mytyk's design is for a kennel that, we think, is 4 feet by 4 feet and raised, per Scott's instructions, 3 to 4 feet off the ground. We attempted to distill Mytyk's instructions... and couldn't. Here are some of the more, shall we say, ambiguous instructions; with our notes:

• "Cut two-inch high notches two inches deep at [the] desired height [in the 4 x 4s]... " Shouldn't those notches be the size of a 2 x 4: 1½" by 3½"? 
• "...attach the two-by-fours into the notches. The sides should be eight feet long and the front and back should be four feet wide." Gotcha: we'll remember that.

"Cut one sheet of plywood into four two-by-four pieces [to] form the shelter. Cut a 12-inch by 12-inch hole at the bottom of one piece. Screw one piece to the back of the kennel frame, two to the sides and the one with the hole goes at the front of the shelter area..." But Scott: you just said the frame is "eight feet [by] four feet ": how do I attach a 2-foot by 4-foot sheet of plywood??? "Use two-by-fours to add a door with an opening 26 inches by 26 inches anywhere you choose." Huh? What was that 12" x 12" piece hole? "Attach the fence wire around the sides of the kennel, leaving an opening around the door frame. Also attach the wire to the bottom of the kennel." We aren't certain, but we think he means to make a floor of "fence wire" (in the eHow.com post we found with the wayback machine, he says to use fence with 1 x 1 squares). Sounds like it would be drafty...

• "Put the roof on the kennel. Cut the last piece of plywood into two pieces, one four-by-six piece and one four-by-two piece." Good luck with that, Mr Mytnyk: you'll have to special-order some 4' x 10' plywood -- and it still won't fit, since you claim that the kennel is 4 x 8 feet...

As you can see, we weren't kidding when we said that these instructions are, at best, ambiguous (the moron didn't make it clear that the "shelter" is framed separately). In reality, this horrendous plan is little better than the cages one finds in puppy mills, particularly since the occupants have no outside access – the jackass didn't even include a ramp to get the poor dog(s) through the door, wherever that was – and it has a wire floor. Mytyk has therefore won our first-ever Jackass of the Day award, but whoever let this bullshit be published at eHow is our Dumbass of the Day!

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