Take The Lead Dog Training

Cheryl is the best. Seriously. We heard about her from a friend and when we meet for our free evaluation I knew she was gonna be our trainer. We live in Lake Stevens which is out of her travel range so we met at McCollum park in Everett for our sessions.
We have a 6 month old Whippet and the web is full of information about how Whippets are not motivated to be trained, can never be trusted off leash, no training collars (they have thin necks), are very sensitive, etc. After reading all this I was left bewildered. I had trained our previous dog (Lab) but I felt like nothing I knew before would work on this dog and I hadn’t even started! Cheryl put my mind at ease. She felt that a balanced approach (a gentler training collar with lots of positive reinforcement) was the way to go and how a dog is trained and what it can and can’t do is up to the individual dog and its owner.
We signed up for her Silver package and met twice a week for 5 weeks. After our first lesson I was so pleased I could cry. Just that lesson taught Dobby not to pull which was his biggest issue. From there he learned sit, down, come, place, heel, stay, not to jump up on people and just how to generally pay attention to me more than his surroundings. Its tough for him as Sighthounds see everything and are intensely interested. But he’s come so so far. Cheryl never lost her cool, never lost her patience and she had a solution for every issue that came up. I had to bring my 4 kids numerous times as we homeschool and she was never (visibly) annoyed, even though they were sometimes quite annoying :)
We did end up using an electronic collar and our last few sessions involved working with him on that. He has begun work off leash using this collar. It also helps make corrections at home when he doesn’t have a leash on and is far away. I would recommend using the e-​collar option if it fits into your budget. Its been really nice.
I can’t recommend Cheryl highly enough. We really enjoyed our time with her and Duke and her impact on Dobby and us will last a very long time. She enabled us to have a well-​behaved dog that we can take anywhere. That’s priceless.

We’ve only had a couple of session so far (still have a few weeks to go!) but I am very happy with the training so far! We got a 4 month old German Shepherd puppy and I was eager to avoid problems I’ve had with previous dogs. We’re pretty active, go on lots of road trips and are out and about often, so we wanted a dog that we could easily and confidently take all over with us. In the couple weeks that we had her, before we started training, walks were already getting frustrating and becoming a struggle. I hadn’t been quite ready to get a dog when we did and was feeling a little anxious about all the work to be done. Within even just one hour, our first session with Cheryl, not only did I feel much more confident and equipped to manage our dog on walks, but walking her was immediately easier and much more fun and I don’t feel at all anxious or stressed about training her now. I’m back to looking forward to our daily walks!
Cheryl obviously loves dogs and she knows what she’s doing. She’s super nice, has a great personality and good energy (I’ve met some dog trainers that are great with dogs… not so much with people!). Her own dog, Duke, is awesome. As an added bonus, Cheryl is also great with kids. My 5 year old is always around during sessions and his favorite part of training is getting to hang out with Duke. Cheryl let him walk Duke this last time and I’m pretty sure it will be all he talks about at school tomorrow!