Found Chicago Boarding & Training Center

We couldn’t be happier with our experience at Found Chicago! Our dog Sammy is severely anxious, and struggled with his confidence on walks, meeting strangers, and encountering other dogs. The fantastic team at Found truly guided Sammy with dedicated care, structure and LOTS of love - the daily updates brought us immense comfort and it was wonderful to watch his progress and growth. Found also specializes in training dog owners alongside their pets to ensure long-term success. We brought Sammy home feeling confident in our ability to maintain Sammy’s training because Justin, Julianna and Mariah (and countless others at Found!) prepared us and equipped us with the tools to succeed. This has been a transformational journey and we can’t wait to see Sammy continue to shine as the happy, confident boy he’s becoming!

This is a hard post to make because we truly loved the pupstart training program with Val and kept our dog in it for months. If you are looking for puppy training, I very much recommend pupstart and Val. For normal daycare and dog training, which is in a separate section of the building from pupstart, we have been very disappointed. It seems like the daycare has a lot of new workers and is struggling with communication. On one occasion, I waited 15 minutes in the waiting area to start dog training. No one thought about bringing me back and when I spoke to one of the workers, he told me he would text the trainer. Instead of bringing me back when I arrived on time, he had me sit for 15 minutes while training was going on. On two other occasions, the staff forgot to feed our dog. We were upset the first time it happened, but decided to return. About a month later, it happened again. When sending any dog to daycare, keeping them fed and safe seems obvious. The first time this happened, we asked to talk on the phone to the manager. The second time this happened we received an email apology. We would have appreciated a phone call over an email since this was the second occurrence and just overall unacceptable. The reason for the 2 stars instead of 1 is that the staff is very friendly to the dogs and the daycare offers a lot of great amenities that surrounding day cares don’t have. I believe Found is a great place, but I think they are currently experiencing a lot of communication issues that need to be addressed and fixed.

Found has completely changed our lives for the better. We brought our anxious, reactive puppy, Stevie, for a 3-week board and train last year, which gave her a solid foundation of training, and gave my fiancé and me the tools to manage her guarding behavior. She goes to daycare weekly and has become a much more happy, confident adult dog!! She is thriving on structure. We continue to send her to daycare a couple times a week to maintain her training and socialization, and we love to watch her report card videos. We are so grateful she has come so far socially, over the past few months she’s gone from cowering in a corner by herself, not wanting to socialize, to now opening up, gaining her confidence, and playing and socializing with other dogs. We love having the piece of mind that when we go out of town, we can board Stevie at the same center that knows her well and maintains her training. I truly can’t recommend Found enough!!

Staff were not well organized, evaluation was quite sloppy and uninformative. All information I gleaned had to be directly promoted by me, and even then answers were vague. The evaluator couldn't give me an example of what 4 weeks of training entailed each week. No clear answers of if other dogs would be present during training, whether other clients or their own personal dog. I asked for an example of the first week of training, to no avail. Evaluators didn't seem familiar with terms like "negative/positive reinforcement", "fear-based aggression", "resource guarding" or the hazy background many rescue animals may have. No attempt was made to connect with my dog during evaluation at all. No solid information or guidlines was provided on training curriculum or methods Facility smelled of dog urine despite blasting the AC. Judging from their lack of attention, I will pass on trusting this facility to train my rescue dog for 4 weeks (which costs ~$5k). This seems to be the place for finicky city dogs to get their basics down, not for long term rescue dog rehabilitation.