10 DecEpisode 103 | Dog Training Q and A! 12/10/2020: Should we send our puppy to do a board and train?
Shari asks: "A few months ago we had to put our beloved 17 year old dog Lola to sleep. A few months later, when a friend of mine who runs a shelter got a litter of lab puppies, she invited me to come play with them. Not surprisingly, I came home with Jasper, a now 4 month old chocolate lab. Already 50 lbs, Jasper is a big handful. We adore him and we're doing our best at training him, but we have a crazy busy household with three young children, two cats and two adults working very full time jobs from home. To be honest, we're feeling really overwhelmed about training him properly. Would you recommend a board and train program to help give us a leg up?" Annie talks about the cons of board-and-trains, and suggests a couple of alternatives.
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Transcript:
Annie:
Hello, Annie here. Thanks for joining me. This is my first experiment with going live in our brand new app, which you can find by going to Schoolforthedogs.com/community, or look up School for the Dogs Community in iTunes. It's pretty great. I'm pretty excited about it. And one cool feature is that I can do this in the app. If you're able to tune in, say hi, love to see if this is working. You can also join these little Q and A sections online at schoolforthedogs.com/Qanda. And you can ask a question in advance at anniegrossman.com/ask.
Okay. Today I have a question from my friend Shari. I actually worked with Shari on Too Cute the Animal Planet show. She was a producer there and I was an associate producer and sort of the resident dog nerd animal trainer. It was a great job for me for about a year. I did it about 10 years ago.
Anyway Shari writes:
A few months ago, we had to put our beloved 17 year old dog to sleep, Lola. A few months later, when a friend of mine who runs a shelter got a litter of Lab puppies, she invited me to come play with them. Not surprisingly, I came home with Jasper, a now four month old chocolate lab, already 50 pounds.
Jasper is a big handful. We adore him and we're doing our best at training him, but we have a crazy busy household with three young children, two cats, and two adults working very full-time jobs from home. To be honest, we're feeling really overwhelmed about training him properly. Would you recommend a board and train program to help give us a leg up?
So I think Shari is in a very understandable position that I think probably a lot of people are finding themselves in right now. A lot of people have gotten puppies during the pandemic, which is a great thing for a million reasons, but also I'm sure is posing a lot of challenges that are somewhat unexpected. Especially since a lot of people probably didn't expect that they would have to continue trying to work from home with kids and maybe didn't factor in what it would mean to have a puppy in that equation as well.
My response to Shari is to think twice, though, before jumping to doing a board and train. I get the appeal of a board and train it as far as like what one imagines. It might be, I'm going to send my dog to some perfect person, perfect place, and my dog is going to come back with all the work done for me, and everything's going to be easy. And all that stands between me and this is money.
However, I think that it very rarely works out that way. And the reason is environment is so important in dog training. And the environment that your dog is living in, in this case in a home with two busy adults and two cats and three kids, would really need to be replicated incredibly closely, in my opinion, for a boarding train to truly work.
Because your dog may learn to be the perfect family dog when there's a fenced in three acre yard, and no kids around, and a dog trainer there working four or five hours a day to practice their recall and their Leave Its, et cetera, et cetera.
But there's a good chance that all of that is not going to translate when your dog comes back to your New York city home.
When we are asked to do board and trains at School for the Dogs, what we usually do is suggest what we call Day Training, kind of like an intense day training program. Day training is where we go work with a dog when the owner isn't home or sometimes they're home, but the idea is that they're not involved.
And the sessions might be an hour. But if somebody is really hoping to get the dreamed of board and train effect, we will sometimes do as much as three or even five hour sessions with a dog three times a week, four times a week. Even as much as five times a week in order to work on getting the desired behaviors in the environment where the dog is going to be behaving.
Second best to that I think is having a trainer stay in your home when you're away, in order to at the very least work on getting behaviors down in the place where they are going to happen. And probably, the ultimate would be if you have an extra room in your house and you can find a trainer who actually wants to live with you and work with the dog. I guess that would be the ultimate, but very few people have that option. Although maybe it's a good reason for more people to become dog trainers, is because you'll get invited as housesguests more places.
Actually, I know someone who works in the world of like luxury yachts and was saying, there are so many people on luxury yachts who have dogs who are problematic. And maybe I need to start a dog training service where we take trainers and send them to go live on these luxury yachts with these people and train their dogs.
Wouldn't that be fun? There needs to be more dog trainers who have the interest in going and hanging out on yachts with dogs. Needs to be more good dog trainers out there, period. Anyway.
Another reason why I always hesitate to recommend board and trains is because it's hard to know what's really happening when you're not there. And training is happening all the time. So the trainer might send you some videos of some practice sessions, but what's happening during all the minutes when the camera isn't on?
And I'm not just saying this because I have a negative attitude about these things or something. Like I know of situations — actually I specifically one comes to mind. Joanie, who I interviewed on the podcast with her dog Nelson, who is a very aggressive and potentially dangerous dog, she sent him to a board and train, and he came back damaged. He came back with fears and anxieties he did not have before.
Joanie got videos from the trainer throughout the day. And of course they showed Nelson, you know, at his best. But those were just moments. First of all, moments that were hard for then Joanie to replicate in her home. It's not like there's a specific hand signal that the trainer can tell you to do, and the dog's going to do it. Dogs are taking cues from all of their surroundings, not just from one particular command or whatever. But also, you know, there, there was definitely stuff that was happening when he wasn't filming that ended up really damaging the dog.
And, you know, this doesn't just happen in board and trains. One reason why I tend to worry about dogs going to daycare is because there are a lot of daycares out there — I can think of several offhand that are within walking distance from School for the Dogs — where they really believe that dogs need to be dominated. And that it's all about controlling dogs with energy and maybe the occasional kick.
And we've had more than one client who has had a dog in daycare, and the dog has developed fears. I'm thinking of one client in particular right now who the dog had really severe separation anxiety. And they ended up putting the dog in daycare because it was just like a stop gap measure that they had to find a place to put the dog.
And the dog ended up developing a very specific fear, actually a fear of Hispanic men wearing hoodies. And our best guess is there was some kind of not good interaction with a Hispanic man wearing a hoodie at that daycare that, I guess it becomes like, which is better, letting the dog suffer from separation anxiety at home alone, or putting it in this daycare?
So that is my long winded answer to Shari's question. Should I send our dog to to do a board and train, the short version is probably not. If you are going to do it in the New York area, there is farfetched acres uptown, I'm sorry upstate they pick up dogs and, and bring them to their facility. They do training there. I don't worry about what's going on there off camera. I think they're very good.
But again, it's not a New York City like environment. So I don't think the training is necessarily, you know, gonna be a total panacea. There's also Instinct training, which is located uptown. I think they all have a facility in New Jersey. They're owned by trainers who are also Karen Pryor Academy graduates. So, I think they're pretty good.
But again not as good as having the training done actually in your home, with you being part of it. That's part of the day training that we do when we do day training. The trainer, every handful of sessions, does a transfer session with the owners, which is really important in order to make sure that they're keeping up with what the dog has been learning.
But my two big suggestions for Shari. One is my guess is Jasper probably needs more dog-dog play time than he's getting. Ideally with other puppies, it really could just be one other puppy. I think one-on-one puppy play time is the best kind of puppy playtime. I think so many annoying puppy problems go away when dogs simply get the chance to get their energy out with other puppies in ideally an enclosed environment, supervised.
My other suggestion, which might sound a little nutsy, is to see if maybe there is another family in the neighborhood, you know, family, whatever that looks like. One person, a couple, a couple with kids, roommates, whatever. But see if there's like another household in the neighborhood that would be interested in kind of having like a dog share situation with you.
I'm a big believer in opening up the idea of what it means to be a dog owner. A dog is not like a house that you have a mortgage on and you lock the door and nobody else should be there to enjoy your house. It's yours. You can be a dog's main caretaker, but a dog could have other caretakers too. And might do better at least for some parts of the day when your home is particularly hectic with someone else who might enjoy having a puppy and would be glad to share the responsibility, share the expenses, share the joy.
And I just think, we can help each other with puppies. Don't underestimate the power of puppiness and how lovable they are. And it just might give you the kind of break, give Shari the kind of break she and her family needs, so that when it is their time with the puppy, whatever kind of schedule you work out, they're refreshed and able to focus on the dog.
I guess my last piece of advice is I know Shari has three kids. They're pretty little, but whenever possible, I think it's a good idea to get the kids involved in training. Kids don't come at training with all the baggage that we do. And I think kids can have a lot of fun with training if they're able to if they're able to do it in a way that's fun and makes sense, and that works. I hope that the training that we help people do, be it in classes or private training, would be kid friendly. Because I think I think kids can get really into it. And why not? Why not outsource the work?
And of course, I think Shari is probably already doing this, but food toys as much as possible work to eat toys. Make sure Jasper is spending as much of his time and energy as you can arrange on his meals in toys. You can freeze it in toys, puzzle toys, any kind of work to eat toy. But energy is finite and as much of it that we can have him eat up getting it out while using toys, I think, the better.
Hope this was helpful. Thanks to those of you joining me in the app for this experiment. We will try it again next week. Thank you for being here.
