A friend and client had asked for their previously trained dog to attend boarding and training in my home. I was very excited to see him and to see how well his training was coming along. I was wrong. When I took him on his first walk, I noticed he had regressed far worse than when we began our dog training Los Angeles curriculum, sigh. How could this be? I spoke with the parent, and she informed me he loved his traditional dog daycare and boarding kennel facility. Now I understand why his training and behavior got much worse and the poor habits he picked up since our last two-week dog training and boarding.
It is important to understand that even the best dog kennels and dog daycare facilities are much more stressful than home environments or playing one-on-one. Adding to that stress are multiple unknown dogs and people coming and going at all hours, the noise, chaos and bullying that happens at traditional dog daycare and boarding facilities. Dogs are shown to be much more stressed than when staying in a familiar home with predictability, and a single person and dog friend playing one one.
But it does worse than that β it reinforces and teaches inappropriate behaviors and manners for as long as your dog is attending. Instead of a Chuk E Cheese ball pit with hyped-up sugar-dosed kids going ape shit, most dogs and parents should be practicing relaxation and deference protocols with their dogs. A dog park or daycare free-for-all does just the opposite. So not only does daycare not reinforce positive behavior and what a family wants from a well-behaved family pet but most daycare environments enable, teach and reinforce everything we do not want our four-legged friends to do and thus set a dog up for failure.
We always want to set dogs up for success. On the other hand, a parent does. I would no sooner let my 2-year-old son or daughter be surrounded by 20 other hyperactive children of all ages, all with individual physiological, physical, health or behavior issues, comprised of unknown, various ontogenies, and personalities, unsupervised or supervised by someone who had no background in education, child psychology, behavior and not an accredited teacher, then I would my dog.
Ideally, your dog would play in one-on-one sessions with compatible play partners selected by a behaviorist. Dogs are dyadic by nature and thrive on one-on-one supervised play sessions. Dogs are not pack animals. By being ultra-selective, a dog daycare facility should resemble a very well-balanced or private members-only country club dog daycare and boarding park and hand-select dog play partners.
