The Devoted Dog, LLC at 22573 Morgan Cemetery Road, Cleveland

Reviews

• Kasie B

  Apr 26, 2018
  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
  So, I’ll say it; Amanda is a miracle worker! We have three rescue dogs, The Dude (3 yr Cattle Dog/Chow mix), Donny (1 yr Heinz 57) and Bunny (2 yr Cattle Dog/Rat Terrier/Chow mix). They were pretty well adjusted, normal dogs, but each had their own bad behaviors. The Dude’s issues: Too friendly; chasing joggers, bikers, cars, the FedEx guy, UPS guy—you get the idea. Once he started running, he wouldn’t come back no matter how much you yelled at him. Being such an awesome dog though, we were inadvertently reinforcing his bad behavior by letting him get away with murder because “he’s so cute”. Bunny had bigger issues to deal with. She’s a fairly small yet muscular dog with a menacing growl as her normal everyday voice. Heck, I was afraid of her when we first got her! She would also chase anything that went by and would also “herd” by nipping at heels. Not a cool thing when she’s also growling and you’re just a jogger going by doing your thing. Again, no amount of calling her name would make her stop. When Donny showed up in our ditch at probably 7 wks old, we knew we had more than we could handle as far as training. We just didn’t have the time or patience to deal with it. We had done the Petco “training program”-Bunny & Dude learned to sit and stay, ha ha.
  
  We quickly saw we needed real, professional help. Our vet had recommended finding a trainer who was a Behaviorist. Yeah, where do you find one of those? As if by fate, Amanda just fell into our lap. The next day a neighbor told me what an outstanding job a trainer had done with her next door neighbor’s new puppy.
  
  It so happened that around that same time we needed to find a boarding facility. Amanda not only trains, but offers boarding as well. What a great way for her to get a feel for our dogs to see if she could help them/us. They spent 5 days with Amanda, not training, just boarding. She treats them as her own; she has several acres fenced in that allows the dogs to run free during the day, while at night they have a separate small house where they stay in crates. We loved the daily updates. She sent pics, videos, texts. They looked like they were having way too much fun at Amanda's; we wondered if they'd even want to come home! Upon picking up our dogs, we noticed that they were happy and rowdy, which was quite a change from the shell-shocked and worn out dogs brought home from the usual kennel stay. We now call it "going to camp" when we need to board with Amanda.
  
  We had Amanda train all the dogs thru her 3 week board/train program and they literally came back “all new and improved!”. We missed our dogs, but the daily videos/pics made it bearable. It wasn’t just the dogs that got trained. They came home with a binder full of information and instructions, helpful hints and commands along with advice. Amanda did the heavy lifting, it was now up to us to learn new behaviors and reinforce the groundwork she laid. We were shocked that the techniques we were using before were actually reinforcing bad behavior, not correcting it. Amanda’s training is AS MUCH about training the dog as it is training the people. You MUST continue reinforcing the learned behavior once your dog comes home, or you’ll be back to where you started. It’s nice to know Amanda offers refreshers by phone, by visit, whatever you might need…for life. Thankfully we haven’t had to take her up on that, but we have been very diligent in reinforcing what Amanda taught our dogs. We, as well as our dogs benefitted greatly from their training and they are so much easier to manage after she worked her magic on them. It bears repeating…Amanda is a miracle worker!
  
  We are now 5 months post training and things couldn’t be better. We aren’t on edge anymore when a person or vehicle goes by. They don’t run away. They don’t nip the heels of people. Bunny isn’t scaring the hell out of people. We really can’t recommend Amanda enough. No matter what issue you may be having with your dog, Amanda can help. She’s seen it all. You need Amanda’s help!

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