Dog Training Sessions

Training Sessions

The first session runs 1.5 hours. We talk properly before anything else — what's happening, when it started, what you've already tried. Then I meet your dog and we get to work, the three of us. By the end you have a plan built for this dog, not a program I hand everyone.

Every session after runs an hour. Most run longer. You're never charged for the extra time.

We work the dog together. I'll take the leash first so you can see what it looks like when it's working, then it's back in your hands and we keep going side by side — me adjusting, you doing, the dog reading both of us. Your dog needs to learn this from you, not from me. I'm just the one making sure it lands.

Then we move.

We start inside your house, because that's where a dog is calmest and can actually take something new in. It's also where a lot of the behavior lives — the guarding, the tension between two dogs, the reaction at the door. Some of what we're fixing never leaves the house at all.

Once things are holding indoors, we take it to your street. The same block where the trouble usually starts, past the fence he barks at, at the hour you'd normally be walking him.

When that holds, we go out. A parking lot. A hardware store. Somewhere with people and noise and other dogs, where nothing is under your control.

That last step is the one most training skips, and it's why so much of it falls apart. A dog who sits in the kitchen has learned to sit in the kitchen — he hasn't learned to sit, not while a bike goes past. The same is true of the behavior underneath. A dog can be calm in his own hallway and still come apart the moment a stranger appears on the sidewalk, because he hasn't yet learned that strangers aren't the problem — he's only learned that his hallway is safe. Both have to be rebuilt in each new place before they belong to the dog everywhere.

We only advance when your dog is ready. Not on a schedule, not because it's session four. If he's not ready for the parking lot, we stay on your street — and that's not a setback. Pushing a dog past what he can hold is how you undo three weeks of work in ten minutes.

What you're actually buying isn't a set of commands, and it isn't a dog who behaves when you're watching. It's a dog who is the same dog on your street as he is in your living room — calmer underneath, not just quieter on the surface — and a walk you don't spend planning.