Happy Dog Institute

Happy Dog Institute is great! The training strategies I learned from Emma's class were highly effective and also easy to replicate with my dog at home. Happy Dog Institute teaches humans how to understand the way their dog thinks, making skills transferable across various settings and situations. They use positive reinforcement-based training, which is not only highly successful, but also backed by science. A great expereince all around!

Signed our German Shepard up for the “Fear, Anxiety, and Aggression” package. We were forced to pay in full upfront with no refunds and told that some of the sessions would be zoom calls. Our main issues were that he gets randomly aggressive towards people on walks and when strangers approach us in public, and he has super anxiety around cars. Training sessions were short, she insisted on 30 minute meetups and zoom sessions, a lot of the time the dog spent in the car when it was in person and she just hypothesized about what could be going on rather than helping us address our issues. If I hadn’t insisted on working more with the dog, he would have had even less training than we got. She focused on his barking when people approach our house, rather than out in public. She said he was too anxious about the car to really even start working with when we had our short in person sessions. We walked away with her advice being, maybe he was left in the car as a puppy, shove his face full of food when he’s on edge, and that we should try using herbs to calm him down. She never followed up about using or remaining session, and we didn’t bother to insist on having it even though we paid for it because everything seemed like such a waste. Couldn’t recommend any less.