Sea Dog Animal Training, LLC

Sea Dog Animal Training is an amazing facility with a very experienced and caring staff. The owner, Heather Crane, is very knowledgeable and cares for the dogs as if they were her own. My rescue dog, Dottie, has been with Heather for over a year and she was our literal life saver. I tell anyone and everyone who needs a trainer or help to contact Sea Dog. Heather is warm, welcoming and a huge positive light in our city full of animal sadness!

I was going to reach out to Heather at Sea Dog and I saw that they were no longer 5 stars. Given I recommend them regularly I was curious and went to see what was up. Someone had left a one-star review with no comments. So, I am here to tell a story and balance out that review. I knew about Heather long before there was a Sea Dog Animal Training and before there was a facility for them. The reason I knew of Sea Dog was due to my work in animal rescue, welfare, and advocacy. I learned over the years that there are people in rescue who do what they promise and all of those people I knew would mention 2 or 3 trainers, but in every conversation Heather's name was always top of the list. In late 2020 I got a call from a friend to tell me about a German Shepherd Dog that BARC was trying to have killed and the story they told was truly unbelievable. They wanted the dog dead so that their egregious failures would be less likely to be exposed. The owner of the dog was in a total panic and needed help. I was close friends with Dr. Stephen Chmaitelli, DVM and he was the first person I spoke to after I got off the phone. We would fight! Stephen and I reached out to people in animal law and we reached out to Heather, because BARC had put one of their middle managers on the stand in the kangaroo court where death was ordered and we wanted a real animal behaviorist with a degree and experience with all kinds of animals. We wanted someone that would make the city prosecutor nervous and we succeeded. Heather came out to our facility and worked with the dog. She put him in situations where he could react and nothing happened. She wrote a roughly 6 page evaluation of the dog for the final judge that essentially said, "Anyone who thinks this dog is aggressive knows nothing about animal behavior. Our attorney put her on the witness list for the final trial. We were on Zoom and our attorney defending the dog waited until the prosecution was finished. The prosecution had read the evaluation and, oddly, chose not to put the BARC expert on the stand to repeat all of his massive expertise of animal behavior (picking up dog poop). When the prosecution rested we were ready to defend and save the dog. Our animal cruelty attorney then told the judge she was not going to put on a case, because the prosecution had proven nothing. The judge let the prosecutor have 10 minutes to make his case and he spoke for maybe 1 minute. The judge then said Free this dog. You see, Heather made it truly difficult on them not just in her evaluation, but in the arrow she put through their hearts. She only charged the family of the dog $15, because she wanted it to be very clear her evaluation was not bought. Since then I have heard stories from close friends about Heather and animals she has helped. So, maybe, you should consider someone who not only has a degree in animal behavior, who has trained massive wild animals in the water over years, and at the end of the day puts the animal before all else. Just sayin'.