Overview:
Our puppy classes aim to help maximize your puppy’s development through group outings and adventures.
The First Four Months Are The Most Important
Dogs learn things most quickly and easily in puppyhood. All puppies should be raised mindfully with a positive outlook on the world, and learn how to interact appropriately with humans. For potential service dogs, it is also vital that they be exposed to public settings including stores, elevators, escalators, checkout lines, playgrounds, restaurants and other busy, challenging places.
We aim to help set puppies up for success by providing them the experience and support to grow up to be emotionally healthy dogs who are prepared for the world.
You have a sweet, well behaved dog, and you don’t want to – or can’t – leave them behind when you travel. But you don’t want to put your dog in cargo, and the airlines say only service dogs can fly in the cabin with you.
Ah-ha! You think. Maybe my dog can be a service dog!
You aren’t the first person to think of this. Approximately 1/4 of enquiries we receive are from people looking to bring their dog on a plane. Of those, at least half of them don’t even pretend to have a disability – they don’t even realize that they need one.
It seems like the perfect solution – after all, your dog is well behaved, goes with you to the liquor store, the park, and your kids’ soccer games all the time. She wouldn’t cause any trouble. She can sit, heel, stay… why not find out if she qualifies to be a service dog?
Sorry. A service dog is not just a well behaved and well trained companion. It’s not an obedience title, either. It’s a title that represents years of work, and you also need to have a medical need for the dog’s skills and talents.
Service dogs do jobs – important jobs. Life-changing jobs. Plus… even service dogs can and do travel by cargo sometimes.
We wish well behaved pet dogs could fly more easily. We do! Support RetrievAir and Bark Air if you can. We want more pet-friendly airlines and clearly, in-cabin flight with dogs is in very high demand.
Each of our classes occur twice a week or more. Each one has a weekend morning and a weekday evening available. Enrolment is rolling so you can start almost any time (except when they are paused for Christmas, for example).
Most of our classes – with the exception of Tricks and Skills – happen at a rotating variety of public locations, from parks to stores. Occasionally we have seasonal special event field trips, like a movie night. These locations are usually in our In-Zone region of Tricities/New Westminster/Burquitlam.
We try to ensure that many of our locations are close to skytrain/transit, but not all of them are. Sometimes clients arrange carpools when they live close to each other. We’re all disabled and we all try to help each other.
Example locations for puppy/remedial classes include Canadian Tire, Chapters, Michaels, and even locations like IKEA by special permission from management.
Example locations for our advanced training classes include Coquitlam Centre Mall, Lincoln or Lougheed Skytrain Station, Royal City Centre in New Westminster, and Lougheed Mall.
Let us guess – your health is unreliable, and you aren’t ever sure how you’re going to feel between one day and the next. Or you have a lot of medical appointments, and they could fall during your usual class.
Welcome to the world of disability. All of our other clients share similar challenges, even when their exact circumstances are different from yours. Our programs are designed to be inherently flexible. We allow last-minute rescheduling due to health concerns, although if we actually show up on your doorstep for a private session and you aren’t there, we will consider that appointment officially missed.
Group classes happen several times a week at different times of day, and members are welcome to attend either one, or both if they missed a week entirely. We have limits within reasonability – you can’t disappear entirely then show up a year later and demand all your sessions, when we may not have room for you, but we are absolutely flexible and willing to work toward an accommodation that works for everyone involved.
Many people reach out to us looking for help with certifying their dog so the dog can fly in an airplane cabin with them.
We do not help with this.
If your dog would be too stressed or unprepared to fly in cargo, then your dog would not make a good service dog candidate. Somewhat ironically, a properly raised service dog would be just fine relaxing in their crate on a plane ride. Service dogs ride in the cabin because they have an important job to do.
If you are looking to bring your dog on a plane, we encourage you to look into the pet-friendly start-up airlines out there. If at all possible, please seek these airlines and use them. We want them to succeed so we can have happy pets flying in cabins, and fewer calls about certifying 12 year old untrained dogs.
You can find the cost for each of our programs and services on the program overview page. On the top menu, go to “Training Programs” and then choose the program you are interested in. The price will be at the bottom.
Our prices depend on whether the program is group-based or one-on-one, and whether you can come to us in Coquitlam and surrounding cities or whether we must travel into Vancouver to meet you.
If you’re looking for the cost of training your dog from start to finish, that varies widely based on many factors including your dog’s age, aptitude, and your patience/dedication to working with your dog daily, not to mention the amount of support you need from us.
This page can help you decide where you should start.
We are a non-profit, but our services are not free. Until we receive enough in grant and donations to subsidize every single person, we cannot sponsor all of you.
Currently, our goal is to have enough left-over money after paying our staff to sponsor individual teams whose circumstances make them especially in need of our support. We hope to increase the number of teams we can offer this to.
Follow-up support for our certified teams is free/by donation according to that individual’s financial abilities. We ask those who can afford to pay for our services and support to do so, because in doing so, you help fund training for someone less fortunate.
Therapy dogs need to be comfortable with a wide variety of people, have excellent social skills, and are interested in meeting and interacting with new people. We can absolutely help you with raising your potential therapy dog to maximize these skill sets, and we can help your highly social and cuddly dog learn how to “read the room” and behave appropriately.
We cannot turn a shy dog into an outgoing dog, or certify a pet dog so it can fly on a plane or be permitted in a no-dogs housing situation.
Your dog begins learning on the day they are born. Everything that happens to them will affect how they perceive and react to the world. So whether or not you are “training” your dog, your dog is learning.
What you are really asking, though, is when you should start teaching your dog obedience, and/or service dog skills.
Obedience is over-rated in service dogs. We are much more interested in:
- Social and environmental confidence.
- Good social skills and etiquette.
- Competence and self-sufficiency.
- Good emotional regulation.
- Their ability to make good decisions.
Most of this is much easier to teach in puppyhood.
Other things, like sit-down-stay are very easy to teach at any age.
Most of the skills a service dog performs rely on abilities that are developed in puppyhood, as well. However, we should never expect a puppy to act or behave like an adult dog.
Training must be age-appropriate, but the earlier it starts, the better.
Everyone wants to know how long it will take to train their dog to become a certified service dog.
We cannot tell you.
It depends on the age of your dog when you start, your dog’s aptitude for learning what they need to learn, and how much time you can dedicate to teaching your dog each day.
From puppyhood to certification, it usually takes 1-2 years to train a service dog.
Those who start with an adolescent or adult dog can take anywhere from six months to three years, depending on how much we need to untrain and retrain the dog’s brain, and depending on the dog’s aptitude for the work.
Many dogs never reach certification either because they are not suited to the job, they dislike aspects of their job, or because their human partner does not have the time or patience to teach them.
Our curriculum is not time-based so much as skills-based. We must start with the skills your dog does have, and work towards developing and improving new skills.
LGBTQIA2S+ Safe