About North Shore Animal League America

North Shore Animal League America is best known as a rescue and adoption organization, but its Port Washington campus at 25 Davis Avenue also runs a paid training and behavior service open to the public, delivered by its Pet Behavior Team. The site frames it as the organization's commitment not ending when a dog is adopted.

What is offered, and what it costs

The service is private behavior consultations and training sessions with one of the certified dog trainers on the Pet Behavior Team, held at the Port Washington campus. The fee is published: $120 per hour for private sessions. The program is named on the site as the Professional Behavior Training Program, and booking runs through a Behavior Specialist on the campus extension.

The two published lists

The first list is everyday behavior: excessive barking, destructive chewing, housetraining, separation anxiety, shyness and fear, counter surfing, jumping on people, begging for food and pulling on leash. The second is the harder end and is published separately: leash lunging, aggression toward people and other dogs, food aggression, possession aggression, territorial aggression and body-handling issues. Very few local businesses publish that second list at all, and fewer still put a price beside it.

How the teaching is framed

The site explains its approach with an analogy – being dropped into a country where nobody speaks your language and then asked to perform a task from a fifteen-minute briefing – and says the team's job is to make the dog's language legible to the owner. Beyond the presenting problem, owners are taught canine body language so they can read the signals that precede reactive behavior, which equipment helps manage aggression, and behaviors that teach a dog to defer rather than react.