How much does a Service Dog cost?
If you need a service dog, you might quickly find out that they can be very expensive. Some mature dogs start at $40,000 or more. Many businesses have a large staff that they pay for. They also rent a facility, pay for a vet, advertising, and other expenses. This all ads up to an increased price. Sandpoint Doodles is different. Our staff is our family. We don’t bring other employees and salaries in. We also use our 10 acre ranch as our training facility. Our service dogs start at $17,000. We start training at 8 weeks old. We usually finish training at 6 months old. This helps keep the price down. Many facilities boast about having 2 year old service dogs. It’s expensive to raise a dog for 2 years. That price ads up. For further questions about our training process call Tanya.
Why $17,000?
Early Neurological Stimulation – Early developmental protocals start early when the dogs are young. ENS and early scent exposure build stress resilience, emotional stability, and a good foundation before formal training begins.
Extensive Public Access Conditioning – An important part of having a successful service dog is having a dog that is completely reliable in complex public settings. Our puppies undergo hundreds of hours to exposure to high stimulation areas, including retail stores, airports, medical facilities, restaurants and others. We want to make sure they remain calm and confident when put into these situations.
Customized Medical and Behavioral Task Training – This training requires hundreds of hours of dedicated work by our professional trainers. We train for PTSD, anxiety, autism and many other disabilities. Our form of training involves positive reinforcement and consistent pattern.
Handler Integration and Ongoing Support – The transition from trainer to the new owner involves personalized instruction, thorough evaluation, and public access testing to ensure a seamless transition.
Alongside their training, our dogs undergo continuous evaluation.
- Temperament
- Confidence
- Environmental stability
- Human focus
- Trainability
- Recovery from distractions
- Noise tolerance
- Social behavior
- Physical health
- Ability to learn and reliably perform task
In-House training reduces costs
The high expense of corporation facilities are often inflated by administrative overhead, third party brokers, and advertising agents. Managing our training programs entirely in house allows us to streamline every aspect of the program. We raise, train, manage, maintain, the dogs. As well as all technical advertising web design in done here. For over 30 years this has been a successful recipe for developing well trained and loving dogs. In the end this means an over all lower price for you.
Why Direct In-House Training Reduces Costs
Many times in business you will find the smaller family owned and operated companies will out price large companies. There is just less overhead. We live on a 10 acre ranch in north Idaho. We utilize our home inside and out to accommodate our service dogs in training. We have our adult children and their families living on the property. They are our trainers. This all means less overhead.
Having been through the struggles of obtaining a service dog for a disabled family member has given us much understanding of the difficult process. Our goal is to make this as easy as possible for you. We do this through our conversations with you. Many times you might try to ask a simple question to another company only to get their voicemail promising a call within the next few days. Sometimes that won’t work. Say if you are boarding a plane and the airlines asks you a question about your service dog. You need the answer now. That is specifically why we answer the phone. To immediately help you with whatever issue you are having. We are family owned and operated. We get most of our business from referrals. Our customer service needs to be perfect. Give us a call and see if we can help you.
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