Building safe dogs and secure homes.

Serving Saint John, Kennebecasis Valley, and Grand Bay-Westfield, and delivering dogs throughout New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. 

We believe that everybody who owns a dog has the right to feel safe and secure with their dog, even in situations that might normally cause problems (e.g., around strange dogs, in crowded spaces, with small children running by, etc.). We also believe that stable dogs, trained to protect can be the cornerstone to your security, both personally and as a family.

We work with you to ensure your dog is safe to be in any situation, no matter how stressful, and to see your dog become an asset to your personal security.

To fulfill this purpose, we sell fully trained protection dogs at the personal, family, and executive protection levels. We provide board & train services--especially for service dogs and anyone else who is physically or mentally incapable of fully training their dog on their own. We also provide group and individual classes for you and the dog you already have in order to manage reactivity/aggression, increase stability/neutrality under distraction, train high level obedience, and even train protection. 

Dogs are more complex than many people realise, but training is also more straightforward than many people realise. At Safehouse K9, we take these highly intelligent, skilled predators and ask them to do incredible things! We work to build them to their true potential--potential that is underestimated by a majority of dog handlers and trainers. At its core, this means building dog-handler relationships based on the dog-handler bond and mutual respect. We are unendingly patient while teaching the dog a new skill, but once the skill is learned, we require obedience the first time a command is given.

One direction, one correction, and praise:

We give a command once--verbally, through lead direction, and with our body language. The dog is expected to obey immediately. If they do not obey, they recieve a correction propotionate to the disobedience through the use of a prong collar. If they do obey, they receive verbal and physical praise. As long as your dog respects you and is bonded to you, they will live for your praise. Because of this, we do not use toys or treats to bribe behaviour (though our dogs do get plenty of toys and treats outside of the work). This approach allows the dog and handler to develop stability and obedience in any situation, from the mundane to high stress, regardless of whether toys or treats are available.

It goes without saying, but protection work is highly stressful for the dog. In most law enforcement agencies, dogs are trained to bite and hold on until officers arrive to take control of the situation. But in a personal or family protection situation, you may not be able to go hands on (maybe you're not physically able, maybe you have children with you, etc.). In this case, you need your dog to stay alive (bite and hold dogs are relatively easy to stab or shoot) and you need your dog to actively protect itself and end the threat. Our dogs are trained to do just that--to release a bite and retarget on a hand holding a weapon, to leave one "bad guy" and retarget on the one who came from the sidelines and is now attacking you, to leave off fighting and recall to your side once you've been able to get a safe distance away, and more.

Other training methods can be effective for training obedience, but if you have a challenging dog or you need your dog to perform reliably in stressful situations, we submit that this is the best training methodology out there. 

You use prong collars??

Indeed we do. Ultimately, working with your dog is all about communication. 95% of all our communication with the dog is through gestures, light lead direction, and verbal cues. We use stiffer leads than the leashes most readily available at pet stores which enables communication similar to the way a horse's reins communicate to a horse at the slightest touch, long before the rider needs to use the reins to pull at the bit in the horse's mouth. The prong collar is a communication tool that we only use when it becomes necessary to communicate that a behavior is unacceptable. It mimics what dogs do with each other and we use the lightest possible correction to achieve obedience--the dog chooses the level of correction they receive. 

What we mean by "stability":

Since we teach dogs to target agression and use their teeth on a human threat, they also need to be "stable" when their handler is not being attacked. "Stable" in this case means that they must absolutely never use their teeth on anyone or anything unless the handler tells them to. In order to achieve stability, we expose both our trained dogs and class dogs to a wide variety of situations designed to build the dog's stability and stress-tolerance. We vary the challenge appropriately for each dog's current abilities, but we are always pushing for the highest level of excellence in this area so that you can rest assured that your dog will be completely safe in any situation.