Shelly's School For Dogs

I enrolled my Yorkie, Ralphie, at Shelly’s School for Dogs for obedience and off lease training. He was a rescue and really didn’t have any real training. I have gotten so many compliments on how well he behaves from my neighbors. He is a different dog. I want to thank Trevor, (Ralphie‘a trainer) for doing such a great job! I couldn’t have done it on my own. I want to thank everyone at Shelly’s and the staff at Green Leaf Pet Resort for all the help and kindness.

So I have very high hopes for get basic foundational training for our rescue dog. I picked them because of trust that they have trained a lot of dogs and that focused full board training will get our dog to a better state so that we can do advanced and agility training. I completely understand that dogs will need consistent training even after they are trained so that they can learn to listen to us. Here is my big disappointment with this whole training process. We discussed a long list of things we wanted our dog to do (basically ability to pass urban canine good citizen test). - three weeks back home with us doing several training sessions with our dog...I have not seen a marked improvement certainly not worth the thousands of dollars we spent. If we were to take him for the test he would fail 90 percent of it. One of the big reasons I sent our dog to green leaf for training was so that he can be socialized with dogs, have a proper structured training but much to our disappointment I don’t think the dog spent any time with other dogs, he was trained mostly in confined structured space. I don’t believe he was trained outside at all. I was also disappointed that you are forced to sign the contract after dog comes back saying that you are satisfied with the training. Without this signing you would not get the sessions with the trainers. Lastly I was highly disappointed that Shelly never called back to discuss my concerns. I think the staff is responsive and likely took good care of our dog. Trainer has been helpful and have been responsive but overall I don’t believe our expectations were met. In hindsight I should have spent more time to get details of training and what is covered rather than relying on trusting the phone conversation to sign up for training. I did read the reviews of others and probably should have learned to ask in writing more details of training. My advice to others considering this training: - do ask for a lot more details of training in writing - do ask what is covered and not covered - ask for a review and end goal delivery of what to expect - set clear expectation for goals and ensure it’s in writing that those goals will be met My advice to Green Leaf: - be clear about what you will be teaching the dog and what is expected - be transparent about the training process - be upfront on what the owner can expect for example if you had told me that our dog won’t get to socialize with other dogs it would have been nice to discuss that upfront rather than saying yes they will be socialized. - please be responsive to concerns of the owners At the end, it has been disappointing experience overall and a very expensive lesson for us to learn:(