Dog Training in Prince Frederick, MD

What an evaluation actually is

It is $100, it happens in your home, it rolls into the training fee if you go ahead, and there is no obligation to go ahead.

The first thing I do is watch. Not the dog performing, the dog being ordinary: how he greets me at the door, whether he settles once I sit down, what he does when somebody stands up, where he goes when he is not being looked at. Most of what I need is visible in the first fifteen minutes and none of it survives a phone call.

Then I ask you to show me the problem rather than describe it. Descriptions are filtered, in good faith, by what people think matters. A household will tell me a dog pulls, and I will watch them leave the house and see that the whole thing went wrong at the door thirty seconds earlier. That is the sort of thing the visit is for.

Then we look at the actual rooms. Where he sleeps, what he can see from the window, which door people really use, where the bins are, what the first two hundred yards of the walk look like. A plan built without that is a generic plan, and generic plans are what people have usually already tried.

And then I tell you what I think it is, what order to work on it in, roughly how long it should take, and what should have changed by the time we are two weeks in so you can tell early whether it is working. If I think you can handle it yourself, I will say so. If I think it needs a veterinary behaviorist rather than a trainer, I will say that too.

You get that whether or not you book anything, which is the point of it rolling into the fee only if you continue. It is a diagnosis rather than a sales visit, and at this distance it needs to be.

What Prince Frederick puts in front of a dog

A small county seat on the dissected western shore, with real countryside a few minutes out.

Questions from Prince Frederick

Do you really come this far?

Yes. The service area is about a two hour drive and Prince Frederick is inside it, so in-home lessons and Kick Start both come to you. What is not available at this distance is board and train, which draws from a tighter ring of roughly an hour because a boarding dog needs the household reachable.

Is there a travel charge?

The prices on the service pages are the prices, and the evaluation is $100 wherever you are inside the service area. What the distance does mean is that a visit is worth planning, so it is better used on diagnosis and the harder problems than on something a phone conversation could settle.

What if it turns out you cannot help?

Then I will say so at the evaluation and you will not have committed to a program. Some things belong with a veterinary behaviorist, some belong with a vet first, and some are genuinely manageable by the household alone. All three of those are real answers I give.

Would board and train be better for my dog?

For some dogs it genuinely would, and it is not on offer this far out, so I will not pretend otherwise. For most household problems, which is what I am usually called about, the in-home version is the better fit because it fixes the arrangement rather than only the dog.

How often would you come out?

It depends on the program. In-home private lessons run as an evaluation plus four sessions spread across a couple of months, and Kick Start is much more concentrated. Which suits you depends on the problem and on how much of the daily work your household can carry.

Can we start with a phone call?

We start with one, always, and it is where I work out whether an evaluation is the right next step. What I will not do is diagnose a behavior problem down the phone, because the things that matter most are the ones nobody thinks to mention.