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. --- Partial 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. Full transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe