Sep 09, 2015

Maybe you’ve been meaning to really buckle down on training your dog, but work has been particularly busy, or your human family has been eating up the hours. Or perhaps you adopted an adult dog, and you really have been giving it your all in trying to train him or her, but progress has been slow going. Either way, it’s totally understandable. Dog training can be a very challenging process.

But training your dog yourself at home isn’t the only option. There’s another solution that you may not even be aware of: Dog Boarding School!

The Local Bark’s 14-day boarding school program—what trainers sometimes call a “board-and-train” program—takes the stress and strain off of you and your household by bringing your dog into our structured, professionally-designed training and boarding facility. During the on-site part of our training program, our trainers will work with your pup to teach him basic obedience commands and the social behaviors necessary to make him a well-behaved part of your family.

Once your dog has completed the two-week on-site portion of our training regimen, then the real work begins: bringing you into the picture! You and your family members—and your pup, of course—will engage in series of private training sessions with one of our certified Local Bark trainers. The purpose of these sessions is to ensure that you have a full understanding of how to fully communicate with your dog. During this part of the training, we leave our facility behind and move out into the real world. Settings for these sessions will include your home, parks, and pet-friendly businesses. Each lesson is tailored for the environment it takes place in, and focuses on reinforcing what your dog has learned while teaching you elicit those desired behaviors and responses out of your pup.

The Advantages of Our Dog Boarding School Program

1. Professionals do the heavy lifting: doing the initial teaching and training of your dog, and breaking old habits. It can be very difficult for homeowners to achieve the kind of consistency necessary for constructively training a dog, due to the usual hustle and bustle of work and home life. Whereas with a professional dog trainer, teaching your dog is our first and only priority. Many people hire tutors, housekeepers, and accountants to handle important and time-consuming aspects of their lives—why not do the same for your dog?
2. If you’re going on a long vacation or business trip, dog boarding school can be an excellent alternative to simply boarding your dog. While you’re gone, your dog can be learning in a constructive and instructive environment. How nice would it be to come home to a well-trained, obedient pup?
3. Dogs learn much more quickly in the type of structured, consistent training environment offered at our private facility, than they do at home. Just as it’s easier for people to learn a foreign language or develop their physical fitness in an intensive, all-day immersive environment, the same is true when it comes to training your dog.
4. The cost of the private follow-up training sessions is built into the price of the boarding school program.
5. Overall, our dog boarding school program is an excellent value. You get the advantages of traditional dog boarding services, while giving your dog the opportunity to learn and grow in an enriched and structured environment. Lastly, you get the sort of one-on-one attention in our private sessions that is truly rare in traditional dog training programs.

Additional Available Training Programs

In addition to our Dog Boarding School, we also offer additional programs tailored for the special needs of some dog owners and their beloved pets. If you’ve recently welcomed a young puppy into your home, check out our Puppy Prep School, a shorter 5-day boarding school designed to help guide and shape the behavior of your growing pup and help him or her get Puppy S.M.A.R.T.!

On the other hand, if you’ve adopted an older dog that is especially difficult to train due to its past history, or if your dog simply has challenging behavioral issues such as leash reactivity, we offer our Behavior Bootcamp program. If you’d like to learn more about this intensive training program, take a look at our seven-part blog series about one particularly challenging student, Shasta, and her success story.

It’s Important to Remember: Follow-Through is Everything

Just as children have to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and study it at home, the success of any dog training program depends on the owner’s willingness to follow through and reinforce their dog’s training. This is why we don’t just hand your dog back over to you once the on-site training period is complete, but instead bring you in for several guided training sessions.

The best possible dog behavior and obedience can only be produced through a solid and constructive relationship between dog and owner. For you to get the behavior from your dog that you want, you have to know how to encourage and elicit that positive behavior, while appropriately discouraging negative behaviors.

But our program’s innumerable success stories shows that as long as you are fully commited and on board with our dog boarding school program, we can guarantee that you will see a fantastic improvement in your dog’s behavior and obedience.

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