The DEV Dog Blog

There are sooooo many cool tricks, commands, sports, and more to train your dog, but before you get into any of that, we always recommend teaching what we in dog trainer land call Markers. 

Markers are short sounds that we use to give our dogs feedback on their decisions and behaviors. 

We call our Marker system: The Communication! Partially because we wanted to get a little fancy and fun with it! Partially because we feel that it is a better way to express the purpose of using these sounds. Once the pup and the human understand them well, we can use them to effectively “have a conversation” with our pupper to guide them in the right direction. That way instead of having to use commands all the time to keep our pups safe and to mind their manners, we can instead just tell them “Hey, that’s great, do that more often” or “Nope, don’t do that”. We can create strong boundaries, which ultimately allows more freedom since our dogs know what they can do and what they can’t. 

The Communicat...

One of the first decisions you’ll have to make in your dog training journey is which training program to choose! Many of us trainers offer multiple options; for example, we offer Board & Train, Day Train, Private In Home Lessons, and Virtual Coaching (for folks not local to us). 

For today’s post, we’ll focus on Board & Train! 

First, what is Board & Train? 

Board & Train, or B&T for short, is a program where your dog will stay with us for a minimum of 3 weeks. During that time we will teach your pup all of the basic skills they will need to be successful in life including what we call The Communication (more on that in a second), 5 core commands (Sit, Down, Place, Heel, & Recall), crate training, potty training, plus leash skills like how to respond to leash pressure and loose leash walking. For more in depth skills like e-collar training and/or working through behavior modification like dog reactivity, we generally recommend additional weeks, but it is all depending on how m...