Call us870-805-6039
Call us870-805-6039
“Trained” is an unregulated word. There is no licensing body, no required curriculum, and no standard hour count behind it, which means one breeder’s “trained” is four weeks of crate work and another’s is a year of documented sessions. So rather than ask you to trust the word, here is exactly what we mean by it.
Every behavior on this page is written the same way: the dog is trained to respond to a specific cue by performing a specific behavior. That phrasing isn’t legal hedging. It’s the only honest way to describe training, because training produces reliable responses to cues — it does not produce guarantees about how a dog will behave in every situation for the rest of its life. Any program that tells you otherwise is selling certainty that no trainer can deliver.
What we can tell you is which cues a dog has been trained on, how many documented hours went into them, under what distractions the response has been proofed, and what we do if the response doesn’t hold in your home.
Because no license governs the word “trained,” we anchor to the two credentials that do exist: every Wagology 101 graduate earns the AKC S.T.A.R. Puppy certification and every Doctorate graduate is Canine Good Citizen certified — evaluated in-house by our AKC-approved evaluators, Elizabeth and Chloe.
A trained dog is not a service dog. They are different things with different legal standing. A service dog is individually trained to perform specific tasks for a person with a disability, and that qualification depends on the handler’s circumstances, not on the dog’s price or training hours. If you’re looking for a service-dog candidate, that’s a separate conversation and a separate program. Our service-dog selection and training standard →
Same three levels as every puppy we place — the difference is how far the finish goes before the dog comes home. Completion dates are guidelines, not deadlines: we train to completion. You’ll sometimes hear us call these Puppy Academy, Puppy College, and the Doctorate program — same three levels, same training.
Name response, core obedience cues (sit, down, come, place), crate and house routines, and socialization to sounds, surfaces, people, and handling. Graduates earn the AKC S.T.A.R. Puppy certification.
Puppy Academy is a four week program that starts at the seven week mark and lasts until 11 to 12 weeks, so you still have plenty of time to enjoy the small puppy stage. Lifestyle training is about working through those activities that become part of everyday life. This utilizes our one of a kind training center in order to build on the family atmosphere. Remember, we train in home settings, not a training room.
Let’s talk a little bit about our lifestyle modules. During kitchen time, your puppy will be accustomed to being in the kitchen with you while cooking and not being underfoot or constantly begging for a treat. During family time, your puppy will be ready to sit in a family setting and watch TV or play games with you without having to be the center of attention. We will also prepare your puppy for travel readiness. Your puppy will be ready to travel in the car with you. We do vet socialization, where your puppy will be ready for vet visits without incident. And finally, we know most families have other animals, so during older dog socialization, your puppy will be ready to come home and visit other family dogs.
Behavioral training is also an important part of our modules. We cover the following behavioral topics. Leash walk training. Yes and no, in order to recognize verbal commands relating to positive and negative activity. Sit. Stay. Fetch. Calm and settle — sometimes we get a little too excited, and this command will help bring your puppy to a calmer state. And most importantly, crate training. The purpose of crate training is to help eliminate those accidents that happen in the home. Your puppy will be started on crate training and should be able to be completely house trained in approximately 2 to 3 weeks once home. This training still requires some night time potty breaks. If you want to sleep through the night when getting home, then you would definitely want to consider Puppy College or our Doctorate Program.
Although this is a very thorough training program, it still requires a fair amount of reinforcement when your puppy gets home. Don’t worry though, we train you as well as we train your puppy. You will receive a thorough progress report every week on your puppy, as well as training videos. To help you reinforce our training with Puppy Academy, please plan on spending about 30 to 45 minutes per weekday reinforcing training. Remember, with Puppy Academy, you will still need to plan on getting up a couple times through the night as your puppy acclimates to its new home. This can last approximately a month or two. Our families are always amazed at what we can achieve in Puppy Academy, but if you are wanting a more completed or refined puppy, the Wagology Honors Program or our Doctoral Program may be for you.
Everything in 101 plus four more weeks: obedience under distraction, complex cues (“leave it,” “get it,” “calm,” loose-lead walking), and public-setting proofing.
Your puppy will start this training at around seven weeks old and finish at approximately 15 to 16 weeks old. This is also still plenty of time to enjoy the puppy stage. All puppies graduating from our Honors Program will be AKC S.T.A.R. Puppy Certified. This is a major step in progressing with any future certifications that you may want for your puppy.
Puppy College will include everything in Puppy Academy, plus these additions to our lifestyle training program. Large group training, where your puppy will be ready for large groups of people. If you plan on jumping straight into busy life with ball games or vacations, then you want your puppy to be vaccinated and acclimated to large group settings. Bedtime — we will have your puppy ready to sleep in the bedroom with you if you choose. This can also be customized for on bed or off bed sleeping. Office socialization — your puppy will be ready to go to work with you. The office can be a little different, with phone calls and new people coming in or out. We will spend a good deal of time getting your puppy accustomed to the background noise or bustle of the office. Travel readiness, storm training, animal socialization — your puppy will be accustomed to cats and other common farm animals like horses, cows, and chickens.
Behavioral training will include stay, heel, leash — your puppy will be able to stay in step with you on a loose leash, tail wagging, of course — and drop. Potty training. This is one of the most important differences in Puppy College. Your puppy will be able to sleep in the crate for up to six hours at night. If you want to sleep through the entire night and be fully house trained, then our Doctoral Program is for you. While we will still give you plenty of resources like our training guides and videos to help you reinforce the training that we have done, this program requires much less on your part.
Your puppy will also be sleeping up to six hours through the night on its own. All puppies graduating from our Honors Program will be AKC S.T.A.R. Puppy Certified. Our Honors Program refines your puppy even further, but it may still require some reinforcement training at home. If you want a finished, house trained, and Canine Good Citizen Certified puppy, then you will definitely want to look at our Doctoral Program below.
Everything in Honors plus advanced reliability and public manners; all graduates are Canine Good Citizen certified.
Our Doctorate Program is the most refined and advanced training that we offer. All puppies graduating from our Doctoral Program are AKC Canine Good Citizen Certified. This is the gold standard of certification for advanced puppies and adult dogs. We are one of the few breeders in the country to take the time and training effort to certify our puppies before they go home. Your puppy will start this training at seven weeks old and finish at approximately 20 weeks old.
Our Doctoral Program will include everything in our Wagology 101 and Honors Program. Plus, we also add to our behavioral training: place, wait, heel, leash, and pick your trick. This is such a fun part of the Doctorate Program, where your puppy can perform a trick when they arrive home. Examples of tricks would be spin, where your puppy can turn in complete circles. Crawl, where your puppy crawls on their belly. Touch, where your puppy will use their nose to touch your hand, and that can be transferred to touching other objects. Legs, where your puppy comes and sits between your legs and can be trained further to walk forward and backwards with you.
Our Doctorate Program provides the most refined puppy, with the majority of the additional time being spent in our lifestyle modules. We cover handling, grooming, stair training, moving surfaces, elevated surfaces, and enclosed walkways. We also provide AKC Canine Good Citizen certification. This is a two part course designed to help you and your dog be the best you can be together. If you’re interested in going beyond the basics, Canine Good Citizen also lays the foundation for other AKC sports and activities like obedience, agility, tracking, and performance events. We are one of the only breeders in the country where your puppy will come home Canine Good Citizen Certified. You can see more details about this program on our website or at akc.org.
Potty training. This is one of the most important differences in our Doctoral Program. Your puppy will be able to sleep through the night. House training is a major part of the Doctorate Program, and our puppies are actually trained in a home with our trainers, and they will be acclimated to coming to your new home. The last 3 to 4 weeks of training is used extensively for house training and socialization in a home environment. We also send home a custom Snowy Pines Labradors home supply kit. We provide you with the customized memory book, engraved leashes, and supplies to make the first few weeks absolutely perfect.
While we will still give you plenty of resources like training guides and videos to reinforce the training we have done, this program is more turnkey. We do refine all the training aspects in this program, but we still want to be there to support you. We just want to make sure we are here for you while your puppy acclimates to their new environment. Remember, with our Doctorate Program, your puppy will be sleeping 6 to 8 hours through the night on its own. We are excited to be working with you and look forward to training your family and your puppy. We are so proud of what we do here at Snowy Pines, and we want you to remember that when your puppy finally comes home, it’s not the first time they’ve been home. Welcome to the family.
Want the methodology behind the levels? Explore our Wagology training program →
The handover is the part most programs skip. A dog trained by someone else responds to someone else. The transfer — teaching you to give the cues, hold the criteria, and maintain the behaviors — is the difference between a trained dog and a dog that used to be trained. It’s included, and it’s not optional.
Your family portal shifts into go-home mode: a 30-day transition plan, command cards for the exact cues your dog learned, a feeding calculator, and your dog’s immunization and health record, ready to print for your vet.
Your trainer coaches you through every cue in person — your timing, your delivery, your criteria — until your dog is working for you. The same session at every level.
The 30-day plan runs day by day, and our lifetime support is behind you the whole way — whenever you need us.
From the day your dog is matched to your family, you follow the training in your own portal — the same system our trainers run the program on. Click through what a family actually sees.
Pricing tracks documented training and health testing — it does not track coat color, and there is no premium for shade.
Deposit: 10%. A deposit reserves your match.
If you’re not sure, tell us how the dog will actually live — not what you’d like to be true about your schedule — and we’ll tell you which level fits. Sometimes the honest answer is a lower tier than you were expecting.
Some dogs start on the service track and tell us that isn’t their work. Chloe on what a “career change” actually means (100 seconds):
So, Chloe, what happens when a service dog washes? I think that term is used a lot in the service dog industry, and a lot of people don’t really understand what that means. So what does it mean here at Snowy Pines when we say there’s a wash or a career change or what? What does that look like?
Yeah. So I think you nailed it. We don’t we don’t love using the word wash because that makes it seem like the dog isn’t, you know, isn’t it’s less than another dog and we don’t see it that way. So we like to use the word career change for them. And what that means to us is that that dog is just it’s not it’s not happy doing what it was originally selected to do, whether that be service work. So you’ll you will hear it a lot in the service industry. Um, and we see it from time to time and it’s usually in our higher level of service dogs.
So for an example, if we were going to career change a mobility dog, that dog is just not it’s just not doing right with the mobility piece. Maybe it doesn’t love the harness, or maybe it just doesn’t love that piece of work. So for us, we like to use the word career change because we will evaluate that dog to see maybe it would be a wonderful psychiatric dog. Um, and most of the time they do wind up going just of maybe a level down to where they are more geared for psychiatric work or therapy work. But at the end of the day, they are still extremely well trained, phenomenal family dogs.
We prefer to assign dogs based on your family’s needs through our Perfect Puppy Match program — temperament, energy, household — and we want you involved at every step so the fit is right. You’ll see available dogs and their levels on our puppies page; occasionally a dog is ready now, and typically the wait runs one to six months. You are always welcome to visit — we love showing off our facilities, our staff, and our dogs.
To you, once the handover is done — and that’s exactly what the handover is for. A dog trained by one person responds to that person’s timing, cues, and criteria. We spend the transfer teaching you to deliver those, and we don’t consider a placement finished until the dog is responding to you.
Trained behaviors are maintained, not installed. A dog that’s never asked for a cue again will get sloppy at it, the same way anyone gets rusty. You’ll get a written maintenance guide and a cue list, and the behaviors hold with ordinary, brief practice — not hours of daily drilling. And our lifetime remote support and LifePlus Pets app are there whenever you want a refresher plan.
No. A service dog is individually trained to perform specific tasks for a person with a disability, and whether a dog qualifies depends on the handler’s circumstances — not on training hours or price. Our service-dog standard →
You’re never on your own. Every placement includes lifetime support from our staff — remote sessions, extensive training docs, and the LifePlus Pets app free for life — and if a behavior isn’t holding, we work it with you until it does. And in the rare case where a family truly can’t keep the dog, we’ll help you rehome them responsibly — we don’t offer refunds, but we will never leave you, or the dog, without a path.
Between about 11 and 20 weeks depending on the level and, more importantly, the dog — completion dates are guidelines, not deadlines, and we train to completion.
We prefer to assign dogs based on your family’s needs through our Perfect Puppy Match program — temperament, energy, and household fit — and we keep you involved at every step so the fit is right. You’ll see available dogs and their levels on our puppies page.
Yes — visitors are always welcome; we love showing off our facilities, our staff, and our dogs. Pickup runs Monday–Friday 8–5, with after-hours and weekends by arrangement.
Occasionally a trained dog is available now; typically the wait is one to six months depending on level and litter. A 10% deposit reserves your match.
You’re welcome to visit, meet the dogs, watch a training session, and read every certificate before you decide anything.
Written by the Snowy Pines team · reviewed by our AKC-approved CGC evaluators.
