Training Philosophy
It’s so exciting when bringing a puppy home! Whether you’re an experienced dog owner or welcoming your first puppy, we are here to assist you every step of the way. Our training programs are designed to teach your puppy high-level obedience and manners to ensure long-lasting success after completing the training program. From taking your puppy to Sarasota dog-friendly restaurants, including Boca and Cha Cha Coconuts, to strolling through Bayfront Park, our training will help you enjoy it all. Our training programs are personalized to your unique needs, offering in-home sessions to teach obedience and manners and address any behavioral challenges you wish to work on.”
Our team are not only obedience puppy trainers but also behavior consultants. Our team is led by our Co-founder and Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, Dr. Echterling-Savage. Our trainers and pre-training team, with decades of experience in puppy training, have extensive knowledge that helps them identify problematic behaviors, such as separation anxiety or resource guarding, while your puppy is still young. Our behavior consultants will come to your home and neighborhood to teach your puppy, working in everyday environments where your puppy frequents. Alternatively, we offer puppy board and train programs and virtual consultations to train your puppy to be their best self.
Training Programs
The 22-hour Training Program will teach your puppy essential commands, including stay, sit, place, come, down, leashwalking and more. This program will also reduce or eliminate behavioral issues, including playbiting, jumping, chewing, and house breaking. This training program is customized to your unique needs and focuses on a variety of goals, including:
Our 22-hour Puppy Obedience and Manners Training Program uses the latest scientific training techniques alongside our extensive experience to guide your puppy in achieving its full learning potential. Our training programs are developed by our Co-founder, Dr. Echterling-Savage, who ensures that all of our private sessions receive a personalized and consistent approach to address your puppy’s specific training needs.
At Beyond the Dog Sarasota, we focus on functional behavior. Our goal is to identify the underlying factors for a puppy’s behavior, such as play-biting, rather than just address the behavior itself. By understanding the cause of a puppy’s behavior, we can develop a training program that addresses the source of the problem behavior. Our training programs incorporate the latest scientific research, including a 2022 study by Waite and Kodak, demonstrating that function-based puppy training reduces problem behaviors like puppy biting. Our training methods are designed by Dr. Echterling-Savage, who emphasizes that “When a puppy training plan is designed around functional consequences, puppy problem behavior such as biting can be significantly reduced in as little as three days, and in many cases the problem behavior is completely gone within one month. That is the power of our science-based puppy training programs.”
Our 22-Hour Puppy Obedience Training Program provides private sessions with your dedicated behavior consultant, who will teach your puppy high-level obedience and manners skills both at your home and in your neighborhood. Whether it is learning “Place” at your home or “Recall” at Bayfront Park, our training occurs in various environments to ensure the highest level of training, even in the presence of real-life distractions.
Each session is 60 minutes long, with the final session of each week being a dedicated lesson for you. In this private lesson, our trainer will teach you how to reinforce the obedience commands and manners your puppy has learned. This ensures ongoing success in your puppy’s training so they can live their best quality of life and confidently explore the best Sarasota has to offer.
Our 16-hour Training Program offers an ideal way to begin your puppy’s obedience training. Our team will develop a personalized program that meets your specific goals by focusing on three or four obedience skills, including:
Our 16-hour Training Program is designed with the latest scientific research and our extensive experience to ensure that your puppy meets their full learning ability. Our training programs are developed by our Co-founder and Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, Dr. Echterling-Savage, who focuses on your puppy’s well-being and needs by implementing positive reinforcement and classical conditioning into your puppy’s training plan. Our training plan takes a functional approach that focuses on understanding the causes of your puppy’s behavior rather than simply addressing their behavior. This allows us to design a personalized training plan that better achieves your puppy’s long-term success. With over 20 years of experience across six cities, we have extensive knowledge in training puppies that is continuously refined through the latest scientific research. This research includes a 2019 study by Arnott et al. demonstrating that functional treatment significantly reduces problematic behaviors such as puppy jumping. Dr. Echterling-Savage emphasizes our approach by stating, “Our special positive reinforcement procedures teach puppies exactly how we expect them to behave both in the home and while out in public!”
Our 16-hour Obedience and Manners Training program runs for four weeks, with four one-hour weekly sessions. Training occurs at your home and neighborhood, depending on the behavior being addressed or the obedience command being taught. This puppy program is designed to target 2-3 obedience commands and puppy manners and is available for puppies 14 weeks and older.
The Board and Train program is designed to teach your puppy high level obedience and manners training. The obedience and manners that are taught in this program include:
In our Board-and-Train Program, your puppy will stay at the trainer’s home, where it will be exposed to various environments in the Sarasota area with varying stimuli and distractions. Your puppy will also be taught at the trainer’s home, which allows us to quickly transfer newly learned skills that your dog can bring back home. This approach differs from most traditional board-and-train programs, where dogs are taught in a single environment.
This training method is supported by scientific research, including John O. Cooper’s “Applied Behavior Analysis” Research. This research shows that for obedience to truly generalize, it must be practiced in many different environments. Different settings have various distractions and stimuli that can affect their behavior. Through exposure to different environments, your puppy will be able to respond appropriately to commands no matter where they are or what distractions or challenges they face. Our Co-founder, Sean Savage, emphasizes our program’s success when he says, “The amount of time and attention your dog will receive during our Board and Train Program is truly unmatched. Because of this, your dog will experience a major behavior shift, which separates our program from our competitors.”
In the Board and Train Program, your puppy will stay at your behavior consultant’s home for 3-4 weeks, where they will receive regular private lessons. Your puppy will explore all Sarasota has to offer while learning appropriate manners, socialization skills, and obedience commands. Many obedience skills will also be taught at the behavior consultants’ home, where the skills learned can be easily applied to your own home. Once your puppy returns home, we will provide 4.5 hours of follow-up training to monitor your puppy’s progress and reinforce the learned behaviors to ensure long-term success from the training program. This Board and Train Program is available for puppies who are 8 weeks and older.
Dr. Echterling-Savage will guide you through behavior scenarios to ensure ongoing progress, while monitoring your puppies progress and adjusting your training plan as needed to achieve all of your goals.
Dr. Echterling-Savage has extensive experience in training puppies and is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist (CAAB), one of only approximately 50 nationwide. In addition to her decades of experience working with thousands of dogs, she also has published research papers on canine behavior.
In this program, you’ll meet with Dr. Echterling-Savage over multiple virtual consultations to design a personalized training program that will refine your puppies behavior and teach high level obedience commands.
Training Behavior Modification Package is priced at $750, including several consultations and ongoing support.
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