About West Tennessee K9

West Tennessee K9 – Nashville is the Nashville arm of a Memphis-founded business, and it is owned and operated separately: the site states it "was founded by Terry Harris, in Memphis, TN and is now in Nashville, TN own and operated by his daughter, Chelsey Collier". Read the Memphis history on the site as the wider company's rather than as this location's – the 4,000 square foot training facility described there is the Memphis operation.

What you can book here

The published program list is puppy foundation programs, basic obedience, advanced obedience, E Collar training, aggression rehabilitation and behavior modification, delivered through private sessions or board and train. Chelsey is described as one who "does private sessions, works with board and trains, and virtual sessions", so a remote option exists. The site carries a pricing page; the figures were not on the pages readable here, so confirm on the first call.

Method

Balanced, with the e-collar openly part of the toolkit rather than a footnote – it is named as a program in its own right, and the client accounts describe it in detail. The framing is leadership rather than command drilling: "Dog training is more than teaching a dog to sit, stay, lay down, and come. Dog training is about leadership and relationship."

Who the trainer is

Chelsey Collier grew up learning training from her father and graduated from Central Michigan University with an associate's in liberal arts and a bachelor's in psychology. She worked at Youth Villages as a counselor and events coordinator, then as a Registered Behavior Technician specializing in children with autism, before moving into dog training full time – a background the site connects directly to the work: "She quickly saw how dealing with human behavior and animal behavior were very similar."

The free-content approach

One deliberate choice sets the business apart. In 2015 it decided to publish its methods for free on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram: "This may seem counterintuitive and go against every marketing concept out there, but we didn't care. There were people who needed help, and now they could get it." If you want to see the training style before paying for it, that material is the obvious place to look.

What clients describe

The reviews on the site are consistently about leash reactivity and recall, and consistently about the owner being taught alongside the dog – one describes three e-collar sessions taking a lunging, barking dog to a relaxed walk in a busy park, with the first session spent on how to fit and use the collar correctly.