Highland Canine Training, LLC

Highland Canine Training is dedicated to helping those in our local community in Iredell county. They often do so much pro bono work for people who cannot afford training or dogs that are currently unable to be adopted in local rescue groups or shelters. They also let their students who attend the school for dog trainers work with the animals as well which is a win win! Thanks for all you do!

Highland Canine has a great school for dog trainers website and a beautiful facility which gave me the idea that I was going to learn everything to learn about dogs. Unfortunately that was not the case.
I was in the first class to earn the Master Canine Training certification, which was a huge accomplishment for me until I was interning and saw how much we really didn’t do when the next class started. My class had 3 students and the next one had 13 students. After paying out over $ 20,000 to attend the school you would think we would do everything listed in the curriculum, but these are the things we never covered. Behavior clinic, dog first aide, dog tricks and therapy dogs, training signal dogs, mobility dog tasks (turning off and on the lights, open the refrigerator, opening cabinets,) training dogs for seizure, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, tactical building searches, swat k9 concepts, training wilderness search and rescue dogs, training the human remains dog, and training the disaster search dog. Most of the other things listed on their curriculum we either covered in the classroom lecture or the lab hours and only a few was where we did both as advertised. As stated in the explanation of the Master Trainer Program it falsely says that we would «learn from some of the top trainers in the industry.» We only learned from the owners. It also states that we would be given «an enormous amount of valuable hands-​on experience that is required to be successful in the dog training industry.» Which was partially true. Our class seemed to only focus on detection, bite-​work, trailing and obedience. The school catalog stated under the curriculum development says that the curriculum is regularly reviewed and updated, which isn’t true.