The Canine Coach - St Louis Park

Canine Coach does NOT practice positive reinforcement based training, and they do NOT have a proper education and certification background for their trainers. I brought my dog here 2 years ago and the “suggestions” from these trainers are absolutely appalling. I’ll preface by saying that since going elsewhere, it was discovered that my dog had severe generalized anxiety disorder which requires medication and a lot of force-free training, and the behaviors they attempted to correct out of him were due to his anxiety. They wouldn’t have eased his anxiety by doing this though, only suppressed him from displaying his anxiety, or possibly creating bigger behaviors due to his extreme underlying emotions. Canine coach uses the word “leadership” in their training. Beware, this is just a replacement word for dominance theory, which has been disproven. Clearly Canine Coach doesn’t stay up to date to scientific techniques from the last couple decades, or completely disregards it. They use intimidation for many training techniques. For loose leash walking, your dog is expected to stay by your side and if they step even slightly in front of you, you’re supposed to do a leash jerk, step in front of them, and say no. This makes no sense, but goes into animal abuse territory when instead of every dog wearing a front clipping harness like the class description stated, some dogs must upgrade to prong collars and slip not leads. I was informed my dog was a “slip not lead dog”. She proceeded to take him from me, put one on him, walk him down the room, and as soon as he barely stepped past her, choked him with the slip not lead. He was coughing up a storm. Another couple was supposed to do that with a prong on their dog. Their obedience class eventually told me to put a prong collar on my dog and do a sharp yank on it every time he barked. They also wanted to physically sit on top of him while pulling his collar sharply up to teach him calm greetings. He snapped at her (don’t blame him!). She then proceeded to tell the class that if a dog hasn’t attempted to bite you, you aren’t training them right, as well as lecturing me on how terrible of a owner I was because she clearly didn’t understand him. STAY FAR AWAY FROM THIS BUSINESS! They clearly don’t care about the dog’s welfare, only how to make the human happy by diminishing certain types of behaviors.