This review is only for the puppy class, we have no basis to judge for the rest of their ability to train.
When we got our new puppy my husband and I signed up for several different puppy socialization classes to get him socialized early and decide who we wanted to use for more advanced training.
I was excited about North County Dog Training because I loved the information on the website and that she comments on the importance of continued education for trainers. I was in contact with Shelley early on and she was very responsive to my emails.
The website says: "Puppy Pre-school is a socialization class. In this class, your puppy will learn by interacting with other puppies in a safe, controlled enviroment, overseen by professional dog trainers. This class lasts six weeks and is one night per week. During this class, your puppy will learn to respond to you when surrounded by the distraction of multiple puppies." It further comments that puppies would ideally complete the class by 16 weeks of age.
Unfortunately, when we went to the classes they didn't really live up to the expectation. For one, there were no puppies...ours was the only puppy, all the other dogs there were 4-5 months old and older. The first half of "puppy class" was free-play between a bunch of dogs, and the first day she even told us our 10 week old puppy shouldn't go in to play with them because he was too little (then why call it a puppy class?!?), the second time the dogs were still too big and too rough with him so we had to pick him up to avoid him getting hurt (and he wasn't a tiny 11 week old puppy - he was already 20+ lbs but thats nothing with a bunch of full sized dogs). Additionally, the training area had multiple piles of dog poop which is concerning for a puppy class given that many are not yet fully immunized.
There was never any formal instruction or structure. During the second half of class she would separate out the owners and puppies and tell them to go practice various things around the property, however, she was not providing the owners with any instruction on how to practice those things. We observed several very confused owners standing around with their out of control dogs.
The free-for-all play with so many older dogs was a little too much for our puppy and frankly most of the other dogs playing were badly behaved and were barking and jumping on people. We decided the class was teaching our puppy bad habits and had no benefit so we stopped attending after 2 classes.
Shelley may be a great trainer...unfortunately we have no way to know that because she gave no instruction or guidance during the puppy classes. She seemed to be very helpful for the older dogs that she was working with so if you are getting more advanced training with an older dog then I'm sure she's great based on the other Yelp reviews, I just wouldn't recommend her puppy class. We have attended several puppy classes at other companies and found them much more appropriate for early socialization and training of young puppies. read more