Unfortunately, I was not pleased with my service. I chose this company because of all of the 5 star reviews but this was not my experience. I waited 2 weeks after completion of training for my puppy to adjust back to home so that I could be fair in my evaluation. For context, I have a 6 month old cavapoo who was 5 months when we initially signed up for services and 6 months by the time he went. Our puppy was about 98% potty trained prior to enrollment. He would respond to his name about 50% of the time, and he understood the command “come here”. We attempted to train him with treats but he is not food motivated. He was also scared of things like leafs rustling, cars, and other dogs barking. We enrolled our puppy in the 2 week board and train as this was recommended on our phone consultation.
When doing the initial intake, we expressed to our trainer our main concerns were to have our puppy learn commands such as sit, stay, and down, complete potty training with possible initiation of a bell, socialization, and improved crate training. As our puppy was not very food motivated, we did not feel he needed training on food manners and asked for main focus to be on learning commands. Our trainer wanted to focus on building his confidence. We did receive videos each day of our puppy. During our training course we did note that he seemed to confuse his commands and at times struggled to follow them. I understand that this program chosen stated “intro” to commands, but we did emphasize that we prioritized commands be learned and not things such as meal manners. We were told we would come home with “a completely different dog”. During his course of training, our trainer stated that our puppy regressed on potty training and was pooping in the house “ 85% of the time” and “mostly peeing outside”. We understood the change in environment may have resulted in some confusion for our puppy initially, but by the end of his training program he had not improved with this. Our trainer made sure to emphasize that he may not perform well because of “puppy brain”.
Once back home, we had to re-potty train him. He does not recognize his name any better. He has been more disobedient than before such as running away when it’s time to go to his crate, ignoring commands, and going places in the house he knows he is not supposed to go (he will stop and look back at us and when told no, he does it anyways). He developed a habit of jumping on people which he was not doing prior to his training. We did ask the trainer about him jumping on people and she seemed offended that we did not want him to do this. Personally, we felt like it was a characteristic of being disobedient especially since he was not doing this prior. He has not improved on his crate training. He does not follow commands such as “place”. He does not “heel” when walking. When trying to place him in the crate he often ignores what he is being told and will sit down and turn away from the crate. He continues to be scared of multiple things such as trash bags, people, cars, the garage, and airplanes.
We’ve continued to do our best training him with the e-collar at home but he does bark and act out on a level 3 and we were told he was trained on level 11. In total, we feel as if we wasted $1900 because he does not appear better trained, doesn’t know commands, and we have had to re potty train him. From my experience, I would not recommend this service.