Tri-State K9 University

I am in the process of changing my very busy one and a half year old pups behavior She is such a sweet girl but as a rescue she know very few manners and so easily distracted, it's unreal. After only 2 visits she listens better, know what no means and how to sit, we are slowly making headway. Note, this Place teaches ME how to respond to her and How to get her to focus on listening to me! We continue to practice!

Our experience with Bobbi Jo at university k9 started about a year ago when we were having issues with our Pyrenees not listening to the kids, excessive barking, potty problems, etc. she did an in home visit and immediately told us to put a shock collar on him and anytime he does something wrong, he needs to be shocked. Of course we saw “results” at first but fast forward to this summer and the same dog started to show aggression towards our son when he would only enter the house. This lead to our son quickly loosing all confidence around the dog. I reached out to Bobbi Jo again in need of help in which she stated to bring the dog to her facility that they can work on it there. While there, she talked about possible euthanasia or even rehoming him because the issue could only ever be maintained and never fixed. These things were discussed in front of our elementary aged kids and only left our son more scared of the dog. Mind you, when we were there, she never once took the dog from us to show us how to gain more control over him or build our son’s confidence. She labeled him as aggressive and tried to upsell us a new shock collar that was $300+ and a kennel that she was selling as well to keep him contained. I do not recommend ever taking a dog to her to be trained. After seeking help from another local trainer, our son has boosted his confidence and we have made significant improvements with our dog. The last place I would ever recommend to take a dog to be trained is with K9 university. There is a reason majority of Facebook posts about private or in home visits show clients buying costly shock collars only to line pockets and not truly train and help these dogs and families.

After seeking help from other trainers and seeing no progress for our reactive/aggressive dog, my husband and I decided to try one last time and brought Eastwood to Tri-State K9 University for a private lesson. Within 30 minutes there was such a huge positive change in our dog that we were almost at a loss for words! Eastwood came in with a muzzle, and by the end of the training he was taking treats from Bobbi Jo's hand with zero aggression. There is still work to be done, but we are all confident that with reinforcement and dedication our dog will thrive under the lessons of Bobbi Jo!

I've waited a long time to leave this review so I could feel confident in how bad of an experience we had. I was fooled by all the great reviews and came here seeking a balanced trainer for reactivity. They actually use compulsion based methods to achieve results - all punishment, no praise. Our fearful adolescent puppy was labeled dangerous and aggressive (with no bite history), and we were told we would always have to manage him, we were criticized about where we got him and why, and criticized for our health related choices already discussed with our vet that she had no business commenting on. She had me correcting my dog (with prong and ecollar) so hard that he shut down and hid behind me and trembled. I was told to give him zero attention, praise, or reward of any kind. I was not allowed to touch him or look at him, and I even had to correct him for trying to seek assurance and comfort from me by putting his head on my lap. This is not how you build a relationship with your dog, unless you think having a relationship with your dog means your dog complies out of fear of punishment.. I still feel sick just thinking about it, but I was at a loss for what else to do at the time. We ended up having to drop the prong and ecollar after that for several months and slowly reintroduce them because he was so terrified of them that he would run and hide from me and tremble when I needed to put even a regular flat collar on. We ended up finding a truly balanced trainer since then and through lots of positive reinforcement and a few well timed and appropriate corrections, he is doing significantly better these days.