@johnemmanuel This is interesting to hear, and thanks for the suggestion! So the boarding option that fell through for us
was a board and train option. They don’t have any of the immersive training available until next year, but we were at least hoping to board our pup with them seeing as they were experienced with aggressive and reactive dogs.
I imagine the e-collar must be really useful for a deaf dog, have you continued to use it after the immersive training? I wish we had done it sooner but as I said in another comment, we’re in Chicago where there are a lot of dog owners, and in such a busy city with such high dog ownership there are a lot of people who also seem to be going through similar issues, meaning the wait times to even see a trainer for intake a atrocious. We tried with the same company near my MIL, a smaller less busy city, but it turns out they are franchised and can only take dogs according to zip code. They explained they could be fined a lot if they didn’t diligently stick to their sales area, but also seeing as training should be ongoing it would be harder for us to follow up.
The two places we looked at were Sit Means Sit and Found Dog Training (are we allowed to mention specific companies? I know a lot of people are mentioning Rover but I’m happy to edit if not!). Both use e-collars which I was put off by, although I started coming round after reading the testimonials. However we had one intake appointment (at the location we thought we’d be able to board at) but I’m not convinced it went well. The whole session made me feel very uncomfortable. I know the trainers are there to make an assessment, but after weeks of no serious incidents (walking past dogs, humans on the same side of the street, responding to leave it after he had seen a cat towards which he made a half assed lunge and no barking!, responding to
leave it and
let’s go home immediately even though there was someone at the gate—I was so happy I cried) it was such a let down to see so much reactivity from him towards the trainer. I’ve seen trainers come in and ignore the dog if he’s being reactive, but I didn’t come away with anything positive from the session. Of course he wanted to see how reactive my dog was, but a receptionist burst in in the middle of the session which made my dog grumbly and from that point on it felt like the trainer was intentionally poking him—standing over him, sudden movements and steps towards my dog, waving one of those dog bite things in his face and generally coming across as threatening. Maybe after my dog started barking at him he felt like being assertive like that was in his best interest to protect himself but it’s the most uncomfortable and nervous I’ve ever felt with my dog and a stranger. When he was waving the dog bite things in his face he said “you’re not going to bite me, see these things are made for biting and he’s not biting, he doesn’t have any real power.” Then at the end he said that the dog was a dog bite waiting to happen, we’ve only done positive training and it shows (I guess now that I think about it it hasn’t all been positive as we’ve had time outs and things like that but I don’t know if that counts), he said I was reinforcing negative behavior, and that the only way to help was a four week rehab program.
I felt very put off but I don’t have much experience here. I expressed my concerns about my dog being very suspicious and I wasn’t sure that an e collar would help. I asked him where he would go from here given that my dog hates him now and I don’t feel like he gave any satisfactory answers. I’m still wondering about the training and trying to be open minded, but I really don’t think my negative stance towards the whole thing is just because my training was criticized. After all, I was there because I was worried I
was negatively reinforcing some behaviors. But the description of the intake assessment said that the dog owner should come away with a plan, and “we cant put him in our rehab program until March” leaves a bit of a gap for me.
Sorry—I didn’t mean to go off on one, but I’d love to hear more about your experience and whether you had any doubts going into it.
