Manners that hold up outside your living room
A dog who sits perfectly in a quiet kitchen and ignores you completely at the park hasn't actually learned "sit" — they've learned "sit, in the kitchen, when nothing interesting is happening." Basic Obedience Group Classes exist to close that gap. We deliberately train around the noise, movement, and mild chaos of a group class because that's the environment your dog actually has to perform in.
Core skills
- Sit and down, on both a verbal cue and a hand signal, with duration built gradually so your dog can hold the position through real-world interruptions.
- Stay, broken into its three separate components — duration, distance, and distraction — trained one variable at a time so your dog isn't set up to fail.
- Recall ("come"), built as one of the highest-value behaviors in your dog's repertoire through a heavy reinforcement history, never used as a precursor to something unpleasant.
- Loose-leash walking, using engagement and reinforcement placement rather than equipment to fix the pulling itself, so the skill transfers even on days you forget the gear.
- Leave it and drop it, essential impulse-control cues for anything from dropped food to something genuinely dangerous on a trail.
- Polite greetings, addressing jumping, mouthing, and overexcitement at the door or when meeting new people.
Why group, and why now
Group classes give you two things a private session can't replicate as efficiently: proofing around other dogs and handlers, and a peer group of people working through the same stages you are. Dogs generalize behaviors faster when they've practiced them around mild distraction from week one, rather than learning a cue in isolation and then being surprised by the real world later.
Structure
Six weekly sessions, capped at six dog-handler teams per class so every team gets individual coaching throughout. Each class builds directly on the last — we track where your dog is and adjust difficulty in real time rather than following a rigid script regardless of readiness.
Prerequisites
Dogs should be at least five months old and comfortable being in proximity to other dogs on leash. If your dog has a bite history or shows strong reactivity toward other dogs or people, our Reactivity & Behavior Modification program — run privately — is the better starting point, and we're happy to help you figure out which fits.
