St Paul Dog Training Club

The Training has definitely helped my dog and I don’t regret my time training here, but what’s helped most with my dogs obedience is my work at home versus time spent in class. Class was most helpful to learn new/better ways of doing different skills my dog knew beforehand and gave my dog good socialization to ignoring other dogs and people to focus on me during training. I also enjoyed learning the proper professional dog obedience rules. My biggest frustration about this club is the lack of communication with anyone unless it’s in person and initiated by you. They have never answered their phones for me, their voicemail hasn’t been updated (last time I checked) and their website is also not updated regularly and shows inconsistent information with class schedules. A stressful example is that I was told class was at 11:15am on Wednesday’s (i have an email confirming it after calling about 3 times and getting no answer so deciding to email them instead and didn’t show up to class that week because they didn’t get back to me quickly and the website said the time 11:15 too) so I show up at 11:15am on Wednesday a couple weeks later because I had confirmation it was at this time and found my intended class was over and done with and had started at 10:15am. Another difficulty I had was sometimes the methods of teaching are a bit rough for what I’d like done to my dog. They would push me to be physically aggressive with my dog (grabbing him by his face and “bouncing” him when he made a simple mistake usually with a stay) (also, this kind of correction has a chance of making my dog riled up and angry versus teaching him he is wrong) when I felt my dog understood his error after my vocal correction. My last and most recent struggle with this dog training club is that with the not updated website, not answering their phones then not having a receptionist present after all classes, made it very difficult for me to question anywhere about the agility classes I was interested in getting my dog into, but I assumed that after my 10 week intermediate obedience class was over it would go nicely into an agility session. Finally after completing my intermediate obedience (but missing the last week due to a vacation so I don’t know if I graduated or not because they don’t keep in touch with their students outside of in person face to face regarding anything to do with classes) my mom stayed after and talked with a staff who said it was too late to join the agility classes because they were in the middle of their session and i needed to find somewhere else if I was interested in agility anytime soon. I wish I could have had any kind of information saying that these classes were starting and if interested to sign up, but again, the website is no help and I didn’t think to ask seeing as how I was in the middle of a 10 week long session and thought all sessions would have a similar start and end period. Bottom line, it is a well informed dog training club and they produce well behaved dogs if you put the work into it, I hope not everyone has the same experience as me, but in my experience here I never felt truly welcome and I wish that wasn’t the case. I’m committed to training my dog but I will find a different place to go unless they get with the times and start taking advantage of the technology available to them.