Complaints

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• Initial Complaint

  Date:04/16/2025

  Type:Service or Repair Issues
  Status:

  AnsweredMore info

  Complaint statuses

  Resolved:

  The complainant verified the issue was resolved to their satisfaction.

  Unresolved:

  The business responded to the dispute but failed to make a good faith effort to resolve it.

  Answered:

  The business addressed the issues within the complaint, but the consumer either a) did not accept the response, OR b) did not notify BBB as to their satisfaction.

  Unanswered:

  The business failed to respond to the dispute.

  Unpursuable:

  BBB is unable to locate the business.

  Between the dates of Dec 20, 2023 and Jan 17, 2025, I hired this company to help me train a service dog. I was instructed that before getting a puppy, my other two family dogs must go through training programs first, which totaled $3155.39. I spent $2000 on a puppy with good temperament from a breeder. I then paid $8752.43 for medical alert service dog training. This company sent unqualified trainers with no scent training experience for exorbitant prices. Their negative reinforcement training methods caused bad effects on both of my family dogs, causing us to not use all of the available sessions. My service dog prospect has developed severe anxiety and stress behaviors as a result of their training methods, making him avoidant of places, things, and tasks that are very important for a service dog (fear of getting in cars, running away from his service dog vest, fear of other dogs, and more). After finishing ***'s program, I was left with an untrained dog that had no ability to perform medical alerts. As a result I began seeing a new trainer, who is now having to help me work around my dog's newfound anxiety as well as identify triggers caused by DTE's training methods. There is still a high chance my dog will "wash out" and not be able to be a service dog. Due to cost and my disability, I do not have the capacity to care for another dog. The St. Louis branch of this company, owned by **** ******, massively over-promised and misled me about their qualifications and outcomes. The trainer I had for most sessions had nothing more than a "5-minute crash course" on scent training before being sent in. I have lost both all of that money and hours upon hours of time in ******************************************** work. As a disabled person, I was misled on a promise of a dog that would assist my independence, but is now an additional stressor. I don't want them to take advantage of any other people with disabilities.

  Business Response

  Date: 04/28/2025

  We are so disheartened to hear you are unsatisfied with the work we performed together! It is unfortunate we were unable to bring your(our) goals to fruition with the obedience and scent training provided by *** and my trainers. It is always difficult working with canines. No matter how much training you put in, sometimes the results are not where we want to end up, especially with specialized training. We worked with you and your pup for 12 months and **** showed great progress. Obedience was always good when working with my staff and the imprinting was on schedule. Unfortunately the process is building the dog together. Clients need to continue training on a regular, daily basis between our private sessions and I dont believe this was getting done. Instruction and direction from the trainers was often met with pushback and not being followed. We also highly suggest our clients, especially service clients, attend our regular group classes to continue getting a more socialized, better balanced dog. I believe you attended 4 out of the yearly 60 offered. We completed all 24 individual training sessions over the course of a year and even offered you more private sessions, but you emailed declining and severing ties. Since you were unsatisfied and admitted to not attending group classes, we sent you a small refund check to cover those unused opportunities. Yes its nominal in the larger picture, but we are still trying to rectify the situation. Our training methodology was outlined to you in great depth prior to you hiring *** and throughout the process. It has worked for countless others. *** has helped so many people with disabilities. Sadly, we could not get the results we all worked so hard to obtain for you and Zeke. We wish you both all the best and hope your new training is a better fit for you. 

  Sincerely-**** ******-Dog Training Elite StLouis

  Customer Answer

  Date: 04/29/2025

  Complaint: 23208460
  
  I have reviewed the business' response and am rejecting it because:
  
  At the first group session I attended, another unleashed dog broke a place command and ran at Zeke.  **** gets anxious around larger dogs because of this.  I was promised that your business's training methods were actually effective, which was a lie, as e-collar training does not universally work for every dog, and no other options were provided to me.  I stopped attending the group sessions because I was told to my face by **** not to attend sessions without the e-collar.  This means that I had no appropriate options when my dog began responding negatively to your methods.  I was pushed into a perfectly lose-lose situation which is absolutely abhorrent that a company training service dogs for vulnerable people would put on anything.

  Zeke cannot walk properly on a loose leash, performs his medical "alert" completely at random, and cowers at the sight of his service dog vest, because he was traumatized by DTE's training methods.  If you have a better explanation for that behavior, I would be relieved to hear it.  I paid for professional trainers' expertise, especially on scent-training.  However, the trainers sent out to my sessions often had little or no background in scent training, which is blatantly lying and overcharging.

  I approached trainers repeatedly about many of the issues I had stemming from Zeke's personality that caused traditional training methods to be less effective.  There were weeks worth of communications where I requested guidance, was told we would address the issue in the following session, only for the trainer that was sent to either be completely unaware of the issues I raised, or to repeat the same instructions that had already been failing with my dog.

  This doesn't even touch on the fact that the first e-collar I was provided did not function properly.   Not only that, but I had similarly been expressing to your company that it wasn't working for well over a week, closer to a month.  It was during this period where I was being scolded and told not to attend the group sessions I paid for without the e-collar, despite the fact my collar was defective.  I only received a new one weeks later when the collar's intermittent issues happened to occur while a trainer had it.  Even if e-collar training is universally successful on all dogs as your policies reflect, I was still failed on account even that tool you gave me was defective, and instead of taking my word for it, I was gaslit for weeks and in the meantime forced to find other ways to continue training my dog.

  **** moved uphill for a while in training, even passed his public access test.  I began taking him more places, consistently utilizing the e-collar and prong collar, but the corrections (administered in the exact manner DTE had instructed me) caused him to shut down and become unwilling to even perform service commands while out in public.  This is around when he began to resist getting into cars.

  I feel it is also worth mentioning that I was told I could receive a refund for the unused sessions, but when I brought up roughly what the math on that would add up to as an estimate, the offer was forgotten and I was instead offered a set amount that was a fraction of what I paid.  Your business's contract is misleading and predatory.  It is completely unreasonable to teach a training methodology that statiscally does not work for many dogs, and then place blame on the owners for any failures of your poor methods.  The reason I did not attend the rest of my group sessions is that I am positive Zeke would have completely washed as a service animal (not to mention the poorly controlled off-leash dogs at sessions I did attend) if he was exposed to those methods any longer.  It is egregious and neglectful that you charged so much extra for medical alert/scent training and then sent trainers completely unknowledgeable on the topic.  The ones who did have more knowledge on those topic often came to about 2 sessions before I was told they had "left the company".  If your company cannot retain employees that can give the expertise your business promises, then the services should not be advertised, much less charged for.

  I recognize that service dog training isn't an exact art, and **** may have learned more skills with more practice at home.  I recognize and respect the time taken by your employees with me.  This is why my original request was simply a refund on the unused sessionss for my three dogs.  Your program made false promises and was negligent in not just giving me broken equipment, but also gaslighting me instead of fixing the problem, wasting multiple weeks of training.  Your team's expertise on service dog training was grossly overexaggerated, which is completely immoral when you are charging so much money for it.  Had Zeke's training been performed skillfully and still failed, I would not place blame on the trainers.  However, the training was instead executed poorly, and with several technical errors and bad communication.  The program you are running is deeply flawed and makes over-promises, especially to disabled people, who are more vulnerable than anyone.  This dog was going to become my independence, something that brought me so much hope at the time, only for me to be viciously let down.

  Sincerely,
  
  ******* "*****" *****

  Customer Answer

  Date: 05/08/2025

  Hello,

  I am not satistied with this resolution and would like to urge that I at least receive the refund that the company agreed to (to be refunded for any unused sessions between my three dogs they worked with).  The small, arbitrary refund they gave me came nowhere close to recouping my unused sessions.  ************ gave me faulty training equipment and blocked me from using my sessions without this non-functioning equipment that damaged my dog's training.  I paid them well over a thousand dollars of the cost to receive medical alert scent training that the trainer was not qualified to perform.  I am disabled and gave this company my adult life savings on a false promise that this company knows what it's doing.  I abhor to think how many other disabled people in need of service dogs may lose their money to this company if they are allowed to keep doing this.  I am in a marginalized group that is exceedingly vulnerable in a place like this, and the owner of this company took advantage of that.

  I am happy to provide receipts for the email in which he agreed to recoup me for my unused sessions.  I even asked how individual sessions are weighted cost-wise into the price of the training package so that we could run the math and get an exact amount.  He refused to tell me this, and instead only offered a small, round sum.

  All I am asking for is my money back for the sessions that they didn't even have to give me.  The owner agreed to this and then backed out.