Dog Training Q and A! 1/21/2021: Are day cares a good place to socialize your dog? Why did my dog stop liking the crate? Thoughts on wee wee pads?

This is a bonus episode: A recording of a live Q and A. Join Annie Grossman for a live Q and A on Instagram most Thursdays. Sign up for the next one, and/or submit a question in advance, at http://schoolforthedogs.com/qanda . Here Annie addresses questions about socializing dogs during quarantine, using wee wee pads if the goal is to teach a dog to only go outside, getting a dog to like a crate again, using daycares to get a dog some social time, and more. --- Partial Transcript: Annie: Hi, thanks for those of you who came to my little Instagram live demo just now with adorable little Poppy. Hope that was helpful. I did have a couple of questions that came in that I wanted to answer as always. I try and go alive every Thursday at 3:00 PM. Eastern. If you want to ask a question or want to be notified when I’m going live on Instagram, just go to schoolforthedogs.com/qanda , and you can submit a question or sign up to be notified. Oh, hi Duke. Nice to see you there. Okay, so this question comes — I have two questions from a user, JimEVF. First one is, do you recommend taking your dog to daycare to improve his social skills? And in a word, No. [laughs] I don’t. I’m all for improving dogs’ social skills, but I don’t think daycare is the best place for a dog to work on being social. I think you want to try and give your dog opportunities to have good social interactions with other dogs while you are around or at the very least while someone is paying close attention to your dog. Now perhaps there are some daycares where they are doing a great job of paying close attention to every dog. But in general, my experience with dog daycares is they’re a little bit more like — they’re too much like dog parking lots. And it’s just, I don’t think the best set up for dogs to really learn to interact with other dogs. What’s more, your dog might have bad experiences there and you’re not going to necessarily know about them. Years ago we had a kind of heartbreaking situation where a client of ours put their dog in daycare because the dog had really severe separation anxiety. She had to go to work and it was just what she had to do. And you know, anxieties can sometimes be like switching seats on the Titanic. Like, okay, the separation anxiety more or less went away because the dog wasn’t being left alone, but the dog developed a fear of Hispanic men in hooded sweatshirts. I know it’s a very specific kind of fear. But my guess is there was a Hispanic man in a hooded sweatshirt at this dog daycare who either didn’t treat this dog well, or this dog made some sort of misaligned connection with this person. And now the dog owner had this new and very real fear to contend with at School for the Dogs. We run drop off a day school , which is kind of like the ideal form of dog daycare. I think there’s a ratio of one trainer for every three dogs. Sometimes it’s one trainer for two dogs and it’s a half day and they work the whole time. They’re doing training, they’re working on their socialization skills, whether that’s being introduced to new objects, sometimes going to new places. But also just playing with each other in a supervised way with professionals who are looking on and then reporting back to the owners about what’s going on. Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe