At K-9 Companions we go the extra mile to insure your training success. How do we do this? When you sign up for our Boot Camp™every dog gets 3 free monthly lessons that can be used right after training, or any time within 1 year of the contract date. We have distractions of other dogs, cats, and horses, that allow for your ability to work around situation setups if this is what your dog needs.

In addition, if the client wishes to go on into further training it can be broken up into shorter periods for the clients’ convenience. Our clients often don’t want to leave their dogs anywhere else while they are on vacation. Once the dog has had Level 1 basic obedience, the additional training can be added on in sessions of 1 week or more at the facility. This allows a client to utilize the facility as they might a boarding kennel. The difference is that the dog will be trained daily through a higher level of obedience, agility, service, or therapy. There will be a lesson on check out and for every week the dog stays there will be an additional free monthly lesson. So to further your dogs’ training you can choose any amount of days over 7 that suit your needs

Hiring a dog trainer is a bit like hiring a personal trainer. He or she is being employed to assist you in your quest, rather than to do it for you. Even if you choose to do our Boot Camp tm program where we do the hardest part for you, you will still need to put in work yourself. After all dogs train out of the relationship they have with their owners. If you do not keep up the training they will backslide. Keeping up the training after it is completed does not require daily training sessions as much as it requires you to keep expecting good behavior and correcting the dog if you notice backsliding.

Just like children dogs will take advantage of you or a situation if they can. They are smart enough to look around and notice if you are paying attention. They also quickly learn who the parent is that won’t let them get away with bad behavior. They very easily figure out who the lenient parent is as well. That’s why in our training program we attempt to get everyone in the household involved in the training.

Everything you do with a dog teaches him or her something. So if you are always playing with the dog but rarely training it, you are going to have a dog that expects to wrestle and play with you. If you play in the house that’s what the dog thinks it’s behavior should be in the house. If the dog is expected to lay around quietly and behave when it is walking around the house, that is what it will do. It is how you program the dog to behave that will make you successful in the end.

Dogs love rituals. If they were operating as a pack in the wild they would develop pack rituals that they would perform over and over again. Rituals such as vocalizing when a hunt is about to begin, who runs the prey until they are tired, who takes down the prey, who guards the kill, who eats first, last, when and where to sleep, is all worked out and practiced daily. In the same way dogs look to us for their daily rituals. It is humans lack of understanding of canine behavior that is the most likely cause of misunderstandings between dogs and owners.

Humans have a tendency to humanize dogs and assume that “they know what they are doing wrong.” Even the concept of right and wrong is foreign to the dog. To a dog it works or it doesn’t work. It’s worth repeating or it’s not.