Thinking About a Board-and-Train Program? Read This First

Why outsourcing your dog's training might be the most expensive mistake you make.

Should You Send Your Dog to Boarding School?

People ask me all the time for recommendations for board-and-train facilities. I always ask them first: what are your goals? What do you hope to accomplish? I never love the answers. “The dog needs training” or “I need him to stop barking” — typically, the only people I would even bother finding a recommendation for are those with a tremendous time constraint or a life event that would prevent them from being part of the training process.

Twenty years ago, I worked for a board-and-train company that made every promise in the book: we’ll teach your dog all the obedience skills, five-week boarding and training program, lifetime follow-ups — the best money you’ll ever spend! But it’s simply not true. Most board-and-train facilities these days are using questionable methods to get fast results, and most undesirable behaviors and behavior problems need to be approached more like relationship counseling than training. Yes, it helps to have some behaviors to work with when it comes to behavior modification — things like loose leash walking, stay, leave it, and some basic mechanics — but most problems have more to do with the environment and the relationship between people and their dogs than they do with a lack of training.

Photo by David M. Chambers on Unsplash

Training, simply put, is building a shared language between two different species. It should be done proactively to help dogs thrive in our human-centric world, and it should be done in cooperation with the dog, rather than to the dog. That’s not the traditional model. The traditional model is built around housebreaking and obedience — teaching the dog commands for them to obey. We have slowly undergone a paradigm shift that recognizes there are more effective and humane ways to teach dogs how to thrive in our homes, through positive reinforcement, socialization, and continuing education throughout their life. But the old model persists.

Even if you can find a quality boarding facility that uses positive reinforcement techniques, you still run into the problem that so many issues are relational or are triggered by your specific environment. The only dogs who can really benefit from a boarding school approach, in my opinion, are those learning basic skills — how and when to move their body, things like loose leash walking, sit, down, stay, and leave it. These are mechanics. They can be taught through repetition, and if the dog does a good job generalizing the behavior from the trainer back to the guardians when they go home, there’s a chance it will transfer.

Puppies should never, ever go to a board-and-train facility. This is a critical period for learning — for developing a sense of safety, for forming bonds with their people, and for important socialization opportunities within their community. Young dogs also go through long-term fear stages, and if anything scary happens in these environments, it can stick with them for a very long time. Yes, these environments can actually set your dog back.

Adolescence is a little trickier. If you were to ask shelter workers at what age dogs are most often relinquished for behavioral problems, they’d tell you without hesitation: teenage dogs. As dogs get bigger, stronger, and faster, people who haven’t built a solid foundation give up. It’s a sad fact of life. These dogs could benefit from a board-and-train program — if it taught self-control, the mechanics we’ve discussed, and if the facility spent real time with the owners to set everyone up for success during the transition home. That’s still a big maybe.

Personally, I see the boarding school route as a missed opportunity. Training is one of the best ways to build and deepen your connection with an animal. Think of all those movies you loved as a kid — Free Willy, Black Beauty — where the misunderstood, troubled animal and the unlikely human find each other, earn each other’s trust, and both come out transformed. That’s the whole point: the connection. You are learning to communicate across species. Everything your science fiction fantasies were made of is right in front of you when you train your dog. Why would you outsource that?

The real barriers are usually time, money, patience, and knowledge — and some of those can be addressed. Knowledge is power. Learning even a couple of techniques — which is one of the great advantages of taking a group training class — gives you the skills to solve behavior problems as they come up. And remember: behavior problems are almost always relationship problems in disguise

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If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your dog’s behavior, I understand the appeal of dropping them off and picking up a “finished” dog a few weeks later. But that’s not really how it works — and more importantly, it’s not really what you want. What you want is a dog you understand, and a dog that understands you. That comes from time, consistency, and showing up even on the hard days. Start with one class, one technique, one small win. The relationship you’ll build is worth every bit of the effort.