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Note: This is long because there's a lot to share about our experiences over approximately 5 or 6 months.. I've seen lots of comments on other reviews that "they're too long." If your attention span is that little, consider the title the TL;DR and don't bother.

We rescued our dog in mid-July and it was evident fairly early that he was going to need some training. Many of his behaviors were typical puppy things, but we wanted to ensure that as he grew it would be safe to have him around our daughter. We also didn't want to have to keep him locked up if we went out so we wanted to make sure he'd learn to stop chewing on everything and would eventually be OK if left unattended for a little while in our living room. I trained him to sit, stay, lay-down and heel on the leash on my own, but felt I went about as far as my research could take me with my limited time. We learned about Bark Busters from our nearby vet and I made the call to invest in ourselves and our pooch and go for the lifetime training option.

At first we were really pleased. The trainer arrived and immediately demonstrated the ability to get control over the dog who really loved to jump on everyone that came in and continue jumping on them until someone grabbed him and pulled him off. He immediately started telling us about the gradual escalation using body language, posturing and then getting up to the verbal. The dog seemed to respond to it at first. And I liked the idea of the structured approach - it seemed there were specific steps you would need to use and specific times to use them. Unfortunately that's where the structure ended.

We sat down and spent about 45 minutes talking training philosophy. I wasn't sure that was necessary, but I went along with it. The rest of the training involved describing some very loose concepts, but never really giving us a road map for what specific steps to take in order to correct the behavior. To put it another way, much of the Bark Busters training felt like I was being given an overall training strategy, without the tactics needed to execute against that strategy.

As an example, we were concerned about his excessive mouthing on people and wanted to stop that. The response from Trainer was "Well, you need him to understand that people aren't for chewing - that he can chew on his toys. So you want to use the escalating body language to get him to recognize that it's not OK to chew people, but instead can chew his toys." Right...that's exactly what I want. Now, tell me how? "Well you can start slowly by walking into him with your legs, or if doesn't like that you can try the "pillow" (more on this in a moment), but then you can always do a loud "BAH!" and the clap." Well, no, which steps do I follow exactly and in what order?

And on and on it went. And this was the case with many of our lessons from walking on the leash to trying to teach recall off the leash. He'd never give us specifics about what we could do. We'd get "OK, so when he's really distracted by another dog you need to get his mind to go blank, so do something that kind of resets him." AND WHAT IS THAT? "Oh, well you can try to just walk him back and forth really quickly." So we do that and Trainer sees it doesn't help - the dog keeps turning his head to focus on the other dog. "Yea he's very interested in the other dogs, so you'll have to just keep it up." No, man. I can't stop in the middle of a walk whenever he sees another dog and pace back and forth for 10 minutes in the hopes he'll "reset." Occasionally when I explained that something wasn't working he'd give me some instruction to poke or prod the dog in someway and say "Well, that's not really Bark Busters, that's Dog Whisperer, but whatever works for you."

The equipment provided to us was also fairly confusing because it was just ineffective. We were provided with what Trainer called "pillows." They're mesh bags filled with chains that are intended to make a loud, scary noise to stop the dog in his tracks. The dog had that reaction once, but every time after that just picked it up and ran off to chew on it. Similarly, the harness we were given and told to "pop" when we needed to correct him, just served to confuse him - it never stopped any unwanted behavior. Trainer's reaction was "Well you're not using it right then and not projecting the kind of anger needed when using the pillow." I told him to show me and he got the same reaction from the dog.

The final straw for me came when Trainer invited us to join him and his dog in a fenced in dog park/trail to let the dog run and practice recall. The dog absolutely WOULD NOT come back to us or Trainer. Trainer told us, just keep walking along the trail, he'll follow. Our dog "followed' in the loosest sense of the word. He was in the vicinity, but paid us no mind and spent the entire time hounding other people and their dogs. I told Trainer, "Look, this simply isn't working." He responded by getting frustrated with me and telling me that I insisted on seeing negative in something positive. I asked him to explain to me what was positive about the fact that the dog doesn't pay attention to our screaming and clapping in public and won't come back. He literally stormed away from me shaking his head. Several times he had to go and retrieve our dog and finally at the end of our time when he had to trek all the way back across the park to find our dog in the woods that wouldn't leave this other poor couple alone, he acknowledged that it wasn't working.

To sum this all up, I suppose the Bark Busters methods may work for some dogs and some people. I suspect our Trainer had an easier time with other dogs and may have dealt with clients who weren't as concerned about specifics as long as they could copy what they saw and it worked. That wasn't the case for us, we needed more work to be done with the dog and more instruction on what to do. It wasn't worth $800 to spend 30-45 minutes watching someone scream and clap and then just trying to copy that. And when it finally was evident that our dog wasn't responding and continued to have issues, Trainer's reaction was to direct frustration at us and suggest we were somehow misinterpreting what was happening. Yes, he finally saw the flaw in that and apologized, but this isn't a friendship I'm trying to maintain - it's a service I paid good money for and the damage is done.

I'm sure the quick reaction of some will be to suggest the issue is with us and our willingness to "practice" but, it's simply untrue. The problem is there wasn't enough structure for us to have anything to practice. I asked upfront if it's possible that there are dogs that just don't respond to the training and they said yes, but it's so rare they can't even think of one.

Reason of review: Bad quality.

Location: Denver, Colorado

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Bark Busters
Bark Busters Response

Hi there, our home office realizes that each situation is unique and different. We realize your training was quite some time ago and do have a standing offer to be contacted at office@barkbusters.com to further discuss the specifics of your situation as we want you to have a successful training situation.

Guest

Does this devise keep the neighbors dog in his own yard and out of mine?

Guest
reply icon Replying to comment of Guest-1609885

I hope this training stuff works because we are tired of being woke up every morning by Barkley every morning. We have to work unlike the lazy dog owners who have no control over their bad behavior nor the their dog!

Guest
reply icon Replying to comment of Guest-1609885

That is up to the dog owner, and the degenerates who do that kind of stuff need to grow up! I also found that most barking dogs are not friendly animals and kind of like their owners GRUMPY!. They all probably bite as well.

Guest

Unfortunately, I had the SAME EXACT EXPERIENCE! I paid $540 for some literature, dog pillows and to learn the word Bah!

Guest
reply icon Replying to comment of Guest-1607304

I have same experience. I endup paying $875 for 1 visit of 45mins, 1 word "Bah" and 1 pillow.

Bark Busters
Bark Busters Response

We appreciate your attention to detail and being thorough in your comments. We'd like to discuss how to develop the structure you're looking for as we understand the importance of it in achieving results with you and your dog.

On a personal level, I was just in a follow-up visit earlier this week where this was needed, and we stood by our client's side to determine clear actions that will help with their specific needs. If you can please reach out to our home office we'll work with you towards this. Our email address is office@barkbusters.com and we look forward to hearing from you.

Please reference this interaction in your email. Thanks!!!

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