D O G Board N' Train

15/10/2025

The Golden Window: Invest in Your Puppy’s Future Now! 💡

The time between 12 weeks and 8 months is the most critical period for shaping your dog's confidence and good habits. How they spend their day right now is the key to the relaxed, well-adjusted adult they become!

Our Puppy and Young Dog Day Camp provides the purposeful structure your pup needs during the day, so you can enjoy a calm evening at home.

Why Choose Our Camp?

Intimate & Focused: We accept a maximum of 4 dogs per day across our three weekly sessions, ensuring superior supervision and individualized attention.

Manners First: Social time is guided and carefully matched to teach proper dog-dog etiquette and the invaluable skill of calm coexistence.

Mental Fitness: Every day includes enrichment and foundational cues (like 'Place' and 'Wait') to keep active minds busy and prevent boredom-related destruction.

Give your puppy the best foundation possible. Enrollment is highly limited!

📅 The first session starts November 4th. Learn more about our program and apply for one of our 4 daily spots: https://www.dogboardntrain.com/boarding-and-daycare

05/10/2025

Elevate Your Puppy's Development with Our New Day Camp!

We are thrilled to launch the Puppy and Young Dog Day Camp starting November 1st! This highly structured program is exclusively for puppies aged 12 weeks to 8 months. This is development done right.

Our philosophy is simple: Quality over Quantity. We accept a maximum of 4 dogs per week to provide the highest level of supervision and individualized instruction.

What Your Puppy Gets:

Foundational Enrichment: Introductions to key cues like 'Come,' 'Place,' and 'Wait.'

Mindful Socialization: Structured time to learn how to be calm and relaxed around other dogs, with selective play sessions focused on good manners.

Peace of Mind: Knowing your puppy is happy, healthy, and developing positive habits while you are at work.

Ready to invest in your puppy's future?

Click below to learn more about our newest service!

Take your dog anywhere with obedience training from D.O.G. Board N' Train in Ghent NY!

06/09/2025

Wick showing off some moves for his first Open Standard Q, though he did incur a fault for his table performance. That was fair, as I really haven't taught him the table, just kind of stuck him on it a few times. He thought sticking to it was optional. 😁He's a good boy and tries really hard. Thank you, Jill Conroy, for the video!

25/06/2025

Thinking About E-Collar Training? Here's Why Professional Guidance is Key
Considering an e-collar for your dog's training? E-collars are an excellent tool, but only when taught to the dog correctly and correctly used by the handler. That's why it's so important to leave e-collar training to the professionals. Here’s why:

Many people use e-collars as a way to discourage different behaviors before the dog has been taught what the e-collar means, leading the dog's first association with the e-collar to be negative. When used this way, the corrections are often high, leading your dog to associate the e-collar with fear or discomfort. This can create a negative emotional response. Later on, if a trainer attempts to use the e-collar on lower levels, your dog might become scared, nervous, shut down, or show other signs of stress because of those past negative experiences.

Effective e-collar training requires impeccable timing and the ability to understand your dog's subtle body language. A professional trainer can read your dog's cues and apply the e-collar at precisely the right moment, ensuring clear communication without causing undue stress. Without this expertise, you risk miscommunicating with your dog and creating confusion or anxiety.

Furthermore, there are specific situations where e-collars should not be used at all, as they can actually worsen certain behaviors, including aggression. A professional trainer understands these nuances and can instruct you on when you should be using the collar and when you shouldn't, and it's also crucial that owners are given proper instruction on how to use the e-collar themselves.

For these critical reasons and many more, if you're considering an e-collar as part of your dog's training, seeking professional guidance is essential. It ensures the tool is used safely, humanely, and effectively, setting both you and your dog up for success.

03/06/2025

Trying to clean up some files and came across one of Drogon's very early agility runs. We were trying to get our last leg in Open JWW at a late Dec trial in 2019. This might have been Drogon's 5th trial ever. We had started our journey in agility together in the fall of 2019 and Drogon had JUST turned 2 years old. I was blown away buy his talent and natural ability. In this video, you can see we are still learning how to be a team together. Lots of bobbles and 1 refusal but I remember being so happy to have met our goal of getting into before 2020! I certainly had no idea at the time that we would do so well and Drogon having such an outstanding career! He's SO young in this video, kinda hurts my heart a bit. 🥲

14/09/2024

WOW! Thank you all so much for the wonderful birthday wishes! I'm so lucky to have spent the day with my Drogon training blind crosses with Melanie Miller and now in RI competing under Zach Gulaboff Davis and Roger O'Sullivan! Drogon gifted me with another DQ :)

13/08/2024

We're back with another cute video featuring Duke the Newfie! We took Duke's off-leash skills to the next level today with an off-leash hike with his friend Kiddo! Duke practiced off-leash heeling with the distraction of another dog running around. Then we broke for a romp in the woods to practice recalls from play. Duke did a great job and learned a lot today!

11/08/2024

This is what fun looks like! Duke the lovable Newfie is here for training in our Rockstar program and he loves playing with his friend Kiddo in the field! Due to the off-leash level of obedience Duke has been trained to, he's able to enjoy the freedom to run and play and he'll always come back when called! Duke is a Rockstar in the making for sure!

We have openings for September, visit our website at https://dogboardntrain.com/dog-training-hudson-valley/ to learn more!

04/06/2024

🐾Everyone welcome Jake to D.O.G. Board n' Train!

Jake is our newest 🌟Rockstar🌟in training. At 6 months old he is here because he is jumping, nipping, and destroying household items like boxes and shoes. With us, he will be learning basic and off-leash obedience, real-world skills, and everyday manners so he and his two-legged family can have the tools and foundation to live harmoniously together.

He is a wonderful young dog with all the potential to be the Rockstar we know he is. He is nicely food motivated so we are getting things started with food games and fun. We are very excited to work with this sweet boy!

25/05/2024

This lovely girl Ellie came to us for training in February of this year. Ellie's owners were having trouble with her pulling on the leash and struggled to take her for walks. Between the pulling, barking all the time, and jumping on people, Ellie and her owners were all feeling the strain and they decided to enroll her in our Rockstar program.

While in the Rockstar program, Ellie learned many skills including:
🐾Walking calmly on leash in a heel command, so no more pulling!
🐾How to do a down even in busy places such as Warren Street in Hudson with dogs and people walking by.
🐾How to go to a place cot and stay there while people come in the house or when she gets overaroused.
🐾How to come when called, every time!
🐾And how to wait patiently at doorways and thresholds so there's no more dashing at the door.

Not only did we teach Ellie how to do these commands but we also taught her owners how to work with Ellie to get the same results we do. Now, a few months later, we received an amazing update from her owner,

"Ellie is doing so well, she has really taken to her lifestyle. She has become a frisbee addict and can't get enough zoomies out in the yard. She is very responsive to her commands, with or without the collar and once in a while even places herself, lol. She spends any daylight time she is in the house up in the window which is new because before you guys we never showed her it's a bay window and kept the curtains shut. 😄 She is extremely behaved up there. If she happens to overexcite and bark that's when she will just see herself to place."

If you think you'd like your dog to be a Rockstar too, check out our website at https://dogboardntrain.com/contact/ to contact us.

23/12/2023

Until a year ago, I was a trainer with a very force free approach. I didn’t believe there was a place for aversives in dog training. I didn’t have a dog that required them. Lucky me!

Until I got this chap. My very much adored kelpie, Evo. Bred to move HUGE flocks and herds of livestock out in rural Australia. A hard-headed dog, with a mega independent streak.

I worked hard with him. I’m a trainer. I laid my foundations, as I have done successfully with my other 4 dogs before him. They worked, to a point. And then, they didn’t.

I was fully prepared to give him a breed-appropriate outlet. Alongside the other work I give my dogs, I have my own sheep, meaning I can work my own dogs regularly on stock. However, my small flock of flighty sheep was far too jumpy for him to work, and he was becoming dangerous out and about in any sort of proximity to sheep.

So, you may say, just keep him on a lead! Problem solved. Well, not really.

Management can and does fail. I have heard it from countless clients. I have had it fail myself.

I also live, with sheep on my property, and surrounding it on 3 sides. Everywhere we turn, there are sheep. There’s no avoiding them.

Keep him on a lead in the garden? We have a large garden and keeping him on the lead would be unfair. He’s an incredibly active, working bred dog, who would end up spending his entire life on a lead.

We also encountered prey drive issues out and about, particularly around deer. His recall was fantastic, but once we moved, our walks were either full of deer, or sheep and he could rip a long line out of your hands to chase something particularly tempting.

So, I decided to bite the bullet and e-collar train. Controversial, particularly online.

But, the absolute best thing I ever did.

The alternative solutions I had suggested were:

Keep him on the lead - I buy good quality leads, but they have failed on me before
Move house - we’ve moved to a dream house, not an option
Avoid places with sheep etc - hard when they’re in the garden
Long line - he could still pull a long line out of reach
Train him - he was trained to a very high level and we had reached the limits via force free methods.

Management fails.

I went through the process of conditioning him properly to the e-collar. I spent ages ensuring I got it right, he understood what was expected and that he knew how to switch it off. I invested in a pricey bit of kit, and I went about it by the book.

It’s transformed his life.

He can romp around the garden, he can walk through my sheep without batting an eyelid, he can walk off lead on the hills and he can enjoy walking in the forest even when deer run out in front of us.

For him, that wasn’t ever going to be an option without it.

Nothing was more reinforcing than chasing.

And it was going to get him killed. He’d have been shot, or hit by a car, or lost. All because I wouldn’t open my mind to using different tools.

Am I suggesting every dog requires one? Absolutely not. But there are MANY cases where they save lives. It’s both saved and enriched his.

He’s happy, he lives his best life. He hikes everywhere with us, he’s well mannered and fully reliable off the lead. He knows the rules, and that’s the key.

He’s not suppressed. He can still go off and be a dog. He tears around the garden with our other dogs, he sniffs and does dog things. But he’s safe when doing it all.

I see a lot of judgement towards these tools from people owning dogs who would never require these tools. That’s great. And that’s also not a problem. But it is completely unfair to demonise the use of a tool which you haven’t taken the time to fully understand. I was 100%, without a doubt, against them before I took the time to understand how they worked and how they were used.

It’s imperative that they’re used with a trainer well versed in using them. It’s also crucial that the equipment used is good quality and not something cheap from Amazon or eBay. It’s an investment, but one that is so necessary for a lot more dogs than you might realise.

Take the time to understand others’ points of view. There is truly not a one-size-fits-all approach in dog training and my change of opinion has opened up a whole new world for all of my dogs ❤

Photo by Saffy Leyfield Photography