Ruff Translating

Ruff Translating has been an absolute life saver for me in training my service dog, Mae. The entire team is incredibly kind and knowledgeable. They were able to make recommendations based on my needs and also on the genetics/breed of my dog. I learned so much about dog training, building confidence, and meeting the needs of your dog. I know I could not have trained my dog for service work without them and she is so happy now that she has a job and has more emotional regulation and confidence!

Update: I have perviously flown with my first dog, a service dog task trained by RT, and when I went to add a pre-approved DOT number to a new flight, RT was still listed as a the trask trainer, and now RT is lieing, saying they never task trained my service animal in order to prevent me from flying with my lifeline. They don't care about disabled people, only people who worship them. Our first dog was trained by RT in the very beginning of the company opening and we felt communication, understanding, and varying techniques were used. But as the company began to grow, all the good qualities we felt RT had begun to disappear. When adding a second dog to our household, we really noticed the type of training had changed. The balanced training that began to happen at RT over the last year felt extremely heavy handed. Every time our dogs weren’t perfect, pain was inflected on them, and the intensity just continued to increase. Pain was used to force them to “behave”. In reality, this caused all the bad behaviors to increase. The more we used their specific techniques, the more reactive my service dog became. Our second dog could care less about pain, so using the balanced tools showed no success in our second dog. As owners, we knew each of our dogs needed totally different training styles, but we weren’t getting that from RT. The same training style was being used on both dogs and failing them in different ways. A typical RT group walk consisted of hundreds of prong collar or ecollar corrections to get a dog to listen. I was constantly encouraged to punish my dog because of his drive. Every walk was a struggle of constant correction and so much frustration. On multiple occasions, I asked the trainers how to use my dog’s drive and not squash it, but never felt I was listened to; we never focused on biological fulfillment. In lessons, I was encouraged to put my dogs into a heightened state and push them over threshold, and then connect them into obedience via a prong or an e-collar, via pain tactics. As a disabled service dog handler, I understand there are places and needs for tools like prongs and e-collars, but since removing them as corrective tools, I’ve seen so much more success, and consistency in success, in a few months than I had over multiple years with these tools. As I explored multiple types of training, I also learned how confused dogs were using RT practices. There was no clarity in communication between handler and dog while at RT. RT is a one trick pony, and if the ecollar and prong isn’t the right correction for your dog, it becomes the owner’s fault for not working hard enough, when in reality there’s so many ways to train a dog. While we were clients, the trainers never did continuing education or expanded their knowledge from others in the dog community. In fact, I was only ever exposed to RT bashing other trainers in the dog community and never respecting any other methods or trainers. Clients are always told the RT way is the best way and the only way. We didn’t get the experience of “train the dog in front of you” and do not recommend ruff translating to anyone who wants to have hope of a dog trainer expanding their training skills and constantly learning new techniques to help each individual dog and human succeed as a team.