About Trainer Dan

Trainer Dan is Dan Castello, a behavior consultant and professional dog trainer who says he has been training dogs, cats and their owners for more than fifteen years and has worked with thousands of pets and their people in that time.

How he works

The service is house calls within about half an hour's drive of Camillus, with remote consultations available for owners outside that radius when the problem suits it. He uses positive methods and describes them as affordable, fun, family friendly and effective. Unusually for this area, he takes cat cases as well as dog cases, and the site keeps separate sections for each with pages on how dogs think, how cats think, and how training actually works.

Where the approach came from

The about page is a long, honest account of getting it wrong first. His own dog Oscar, a German Shepherd and Chow Chow mix acquired just before he finished high school, guarded food, rawhides, the couch and the basement door, escaped the yard, would not walk on leash and had to be muzzled at the vet. Dan describes responding the way he had seen on television, pushing the dog down and pinning him, and at one point barking at him for fifteen minutes. Family obedience classes based on collar corrections and physically placing the dog into position made Oscar more agitated rather than less, and the more stressed he got the less he complied.

Why that matters to a client

The site uses that story to explain the shift to positive methods rather than to sell a credential, and the practice that came out of it is aimed squarely at owners of difficult dogs who have already tried the harder approach and found it made things worse.