About
North Yard is one trainer and one apprentice on eleven acres. We could take more dogs. Taking more dogs is how a training kennel turns into a boarding kennel with a leash in it.
Owner and head trainer
Cal came into this the long way, through eight years of shelter work and a lot of dogs that were out of options by the time he met them. He opened North Yard in 2016 with two runs and a borrowed truck.
He takes every assessment himself and runs every handover himself. If you talk to somebody on the phone about your dog, it is him.
How we train
Almost every dog that arrives here has found something that paid off at least once. Barking moved the mailman along. Pulling got him to the tree faster. The job is to make our answer easier than the one he already found.
Dogs settle quickly once the response to a behavior is the same every time. That gets hard when four people live in the house and one of them is eleven, so a good chunk of the handover is spent on the humans.
A trained dog going home to an untrained house is back where it started inside a month. That is why the handover runs two hours and why we come out to you again afterwards.
On tools: flat collars and long lines for most of it, and on some dogs a low-level e-collar once two weeks of leash work are behind us. We teach you to use anything that goes home with your dog. If you would rather we left the e-collar out of it, say so and we will train without one.
The yard
The assessment morning is free and there is no obligation on either side at the end of it.