THIS IS LONG BUT A MUST READ FOR ANYONE CONSIDERING DOG TRAINING!!!

A year ago my husband and I took in a 12 week old puppy from a rescue, a Labrador-Pitbull mix. within the first couple months of having her in our home she chewed a hole in my husband’s new leather couch, she ate one of that laminate wood stairs that leads to our second floor, she would jump all over everybody that walked through our front door, she would dig holes under our fence and take off running, she would pull and bite on her leash during walks, chew on the kids toys along with all of our shoes and clothes and she would run off and chase our neighbors as they walked past our home. By the time she reached six months old we had had enough and was ready to take her to the pound or try to find her a new home, but in hopes of making it work my husband and I decided to look into dog training. I, like most consumers, logged on and used Google in hopes of finding one in the Orlando area that would work. I called Hal from Canine Magic and spoke with him regarding the issues we were having with our new dog, he seemed very confident that the issues we were experiencing were easy fixes and that he would love to take our case on; however, at the time he was very busy with his current clients and would need to work us in over the following couple weeks. Well, I was impatient and went back to Google and located another trainer in our area of Avalon. I spoke with this second trainer over the phone and they seemed knowledgeable about dog training and behaviors so we decided to hire them. The trainer came to our home for an introduction day and gave us a price list; the prices seemed very high but we thought “you get what you pay for” so we ended up giving the entire amount up front, $750, so we could take advantage of a small discount being offered. This included 10 sessions in our home with the dog and trainer. This trainer explained that the only proper way to train a dog is to constantly feed them food or treats to get them to do what we needed; however, what happened by the 7th visit is that our dog would do nothing unless we had a bag of food with us and the dog would actually do bad behaviors in order to be corrected to get more food. Sadly, but our dog was worse than she had ever been. The trainer tried to tell me that the reason why the training was not working was because I work too much and I’m not home enough when she is there to understand how to make it work. Remembering that I spoke to Hal several weeks prior, I called him again and asked him some basic questions about dog training and he was more than willing to explain why the training we were paying for was not working and it wasn’t because I work too much. Needless to say I fired the trainer. I then called Hal again and begged him to come out and meet our dog; by this point my husband said I only had a couple days left before he was going to get rid of her. I knew that her breed, size, and being all black would get her in the front of the line to be put down; with this is mind I turned to Hal. Hal came out 2 days later to meet our dog, he spend one hour with us that day and I can honestly say that our dog was a different dog by the time he left!! My husband and I were so impressed that we hired him right away. Hal worked with us for the following few weeks and we just finished our training with him today and believe me when I say our dog is a different dog. She walks on a leash without issues, she has stopped chewing on our belongings, she listens to our commands, and doesn’t jump on any guests when they come over; realistically this is a small list of what our dog can now do. My husband and I honestly thought we were just not puppy people and that we adopted that one dog that couldn’t be trained, but Hal changed all of this. Not only did he save our dogs life by not having her taken to the pound but we also couldn’t be happier with her. Our one regret is that we didn’t hire Hal sooner. Thank You Hal!!