Longsnouts [Dog Training]

We signed our puppy up for the 5 week puppy course. We unfortunately did not enjoy our experience. A lot of factors contributed to this rating. First, we felt that the training content itself was ineffective. The trainer gave us a lot of information about dog behavior and personality. But this is expected of a dog training professional. We felt that the trainer did not really take the time to understand our puppy's personality. Our new trainer (at a different school) took the time to get to know our puppy, working with her constantly and now our puppy listens to the new trainer very effectively. Longsnouts worked with our puppy a little bit, but very minimally and not even close to the level or effectiveness as our new trainer. We did not learn any new commands or techniques. There were a few variations of techniques we had learned in the past, but nothing unique or exciting. In comparison, both our new class and the class we took prior to Longsnouts provided us with far more content, new tricks, commands, techniques, behavior responses, rewarding methods, etc. Second, our puppy learned a bad habit. She used to jump on people, but not too badly. During class, our puppy would get excited and jump on the trainer. The trainer, knowing jumping is bad, would wait until our dog stops jumping. But the trainer would treat the jumping within 1-2 seconds. This resulted in our puppy learning to jump more because she got rewarded for it. We now have to deal with our dog jumping on people and flipping somersaults in the air. But we were really frustrated when it happened. The trainer would say "it's okay, I'm not worried as long as the food is given after the dog sits." But I think it is too soon after. Our dog ended up learning to jump more and more wildly. Before training class, she would maybe stand a little and jump gently. Now, she flips and kicks repetitively. It started happening the day after the first class and got worse after each class. We went to a new trainer that was able to quickly and effectively begin reversing this issue. Third, the class structure is too liberal and unstructured. No curriculum, the trainer just teaches whatever comes up. However, it also resulted in us learning things very repetitively. We practiced loose leash walking maybe 20-30 minutes per class for 3 classes in a row. The trainer walks around to each dog but it's outdoors, and dogs are far from each other (to facilitate training) so it's a very separated experience. And then the trainer will start talking sometimes to give a lesson - if you are too far and don't notice then you will miss it. The trainer gives each dog too little personal time, especially if the class is larger. 8 dogs in a 60 minute class, with maybe 20 minutes of group time, is only 5 minutes per dog at most, excluding walking between dogs. If she spends a long time on another dog you might only get 1-2 minutes with her, which happened a couple times. Finally, the trainer seemed to refuse to acknowledge our puppy's specific issues. Our puppy has a specific behavioral issue that's considered pretty serious. We asked our trainer to address it or give some advice on how to resolve it, but the trainer did not believe us, because she did not see it in-person. We showed her a video, but she essentially told us that the issue was happening only because of the class setting. We asked her constantly, both in-person and in email, to address the issue but we never received a satisfying response. She gave a few thoughts but nothing that was substantial for us. We received similar/better advice from researching online for less than 5 minutes. The trainer made multiple promises to watch our puppy throughout class to see if she is exhibiting the behavioral issue. However, the trainer did not seem to watch; our puppy displayed the issue multiple times every single class and the trainer never acknowledged it. We had to bring it up for the topic to even be addressed. Overall, our experience was just poor. I'm sure others may have a good experience, but that was not the case for us.

Hannah was a savior for our family! We signed up for four in-home sessions to help us manage interactions between our toddler and our dog. After a few instances when our dog had snipped at our toddler, we were fairly nervous. Hannah was absolutely amazing in helping us restore our confidence in dealing with our dog. She is an absolute delight to work with and is incredibly knowledgeable about everything dog-related!

Review updated-- we've been working with Hannah for many months now and I recommend her to everyone! We chose her initially because we love her philosophy around training, see her website. She's really, really good with dogs, plus she blends science with a deep understanding (and years of experience) of dog behavior. And her prices are reasonable. Plus she has an active FB group for us which is great.