About RPG Dog Training LLC

Who they are

RPG Dog Training – RPG Dogs on its own site – is a Springfield training business built around two things: an owner-trained service dog school and a set of six-week group courses. Of the service-dog side, the site says the trainer has ten years of first-hand experience of the joys and struggles of the service dog journey.

The service dog school

This is the most structured thing on the site and runs in three phases. Phase one is obedience: sit and stay through to complex routines, heel, moving through a crowd and extended stays the dog holds until released, with outings designed to build focus in new and distracting environments and practice days at a doctor's office or around emergency services. Phase two is public access – learning when the dog is working and when it is off duty, then the rules of behaving in public, from not sniffing merchandise or taking things off the floor through to ignoring people who actively try to distract the dog, with practice at handling access challenges. Phase three is task training, starting with the alert style the handler prefers – the site names nose, paw and lick alerts among others – then pairing the alert with the disability and proofing it through mock scenarios and real outings.

Group courses

Four six-week courses are published at $150 each. Puppy Socials takes dogs from three to nine months and covers polite greetings, leash skills, sit, down, stand, touch and stay, leave it, recall, preventing resource guarding and managing puppy biting. Adolescent Struggles takes six to fifteen months and works on focus around distractions, intermediate obedience and polite interactions. Life Skills is open to all ages and is the manners course – loose leash, recall, place, polite greetings and leave it. The Reactive Dog course teaches five skills for a dog to disengage from a trigger, covering recall from triggers, reducing trigger build-up, shortening the cool-down afterwards and building confidence on both ends of the leash.

Individual options and prices

The site publishes its individual rates. Doggy Adventure School, which it calls its most popular service, is $50 for a day combining training, exercise and enrichment. An in-home individual session with a trainer traveling to the client is $125; the same session at the RPG facility, which the site recommends as a low-distraction environment for new or complex work, is $100.

Method

The site is explicit that this is not a send-the-dog-away service. Every program is described as owner engaged, with progress depending on the owner doing the homework and following up on maintenance, and the site's own framing is that trainers are collaborating with thinking beings rather than programming computers.