Instinct Dog Behavior & Training Portland

If I could give it zero stars I would. I've never written a bad review before, we are people who understand that things happen sometimes, but it was truly a wild and very disappointing customer service experience. We were very excited to start with Instinct. We did a ton of research and they seemed to fit exactly what we were looking for. We paid for a 3-session package and our first session was a positive meet-and-greet with our trainer, who seemed so awesome. They showed us how to use their interactive portal, Trello, as a integral part of the training experience where our pup's goals and accomplishments would be documented along with the resources we needed to reference and reinforce the skills we were supposed to be working on in-between sessions. Cut to over a month later, we are still waiting on a reply to schedule our second session. We literally just never heard back from our trainer, nor was anything ever uploaded into our Trello account. We made an appropriate amount of attempts to contact and schedule as we had paid for a 3-session package, but did not hear back. They also said that they would look into some recommended boarding options, also waiting on that reply. Feeling disappointed and like the clock was ticking on our training window, we felt sort of forced to seek training services from another company. We reached out to Instinct management seeking a refund for the two unused sessions, to which they declined. When we shared our experience to just let them know that we moved on because we hadn't heard back and nothing was ever uploaded into our Trello account, they offered to provide us with one more session with a different trainer and if we still wanted to cancel they would refund us for the one unused session. We communicated that we weren't interested in continuing our experience with them and were hopeful that they would recognize the financial investment we made with them and just take the overall customer experience into consideration, but they continued to decline a refund for the two unused sessions, disregarding that the reason we didn't want to continue with them is that they didn't uphold a single aspect of what we had paid for. Hopefully our experience was an exception to the rule as there are many positive reviews. Just feeling blown away that they are acknowledging that they didn't follow through on any aspect and still won't refund us for the two unused sessions. Wild.

Kirah has been a wealth of knowledge and with her guidance and instruction we are making meaningful progress in learning how to manage our dog's leash reactivity towards other dogs and bicycles. We are moving to Taiwan, which will be a stressful transition for our dog, and she has also helped us prepare and plan for the road ahead. We're also generally impressed with the caliber of this organization. You can tell that everyone on their team is passionate and committed to supporting dogs and their owners.

Poppy Higgins from Instinct was a lifesaver for our reactive dog. She brought so much patience, kindness and expertise in an intensive homeschool program, and her work was worth every penny. Poppy was also very compassionate when we made the heartbreaking decision that we were unable to give our reactive pup the life she deserved and had to rehome. Highly recommend Poppy and Instinct in general for highly professional, force-free behavior modification.