Will it work for YOUR dog? Five profiles
"Works for any breed and any age" is what every other review says, and it is a way of avoiding the question. Here is the honest version, by profile. Two of these five are a no.
Yes, but not instead of a puppy class
Profile 1: Puppy under six months
The critical socialisation window closes somewhere around 12 to 16 weeks and it does not reopen. During that period the priority is safe exposure to people, surfaces, sounds and other dogs, and that has to happen in the real world, not on a mat in your living room.
The Level 1 and Level 2 games are an excellent complement: attention, eye contact, early impulse control. But if you can only afford one thing right now, spend it on an in-person puppy socialisation class and buy the course afterwards, or buy it for the ten indoor minutes a day and keep the class as the priority.
Yes. This is the dog it was built for
Profile 2: Healthy, bored adult who is acting up (1 to 7 years)
Chews the furniture, barks at nothing, digs, climbs the sofa, ignores recall, has energy to spare and no job to do. This is where the value is genuinely hard to argue with: $67 and fifteen minutes a day. In my experience with dogs in this state, and in the pattern buyers describe publicly, a good share of the nuisance behavior eases once the underlying boredom is being addressed. How much, and how fast, varies with the dog and with how consistent you are.
This is the only profile where we would say buy it without overthinking it.
Yes, with edits
Profile 3: Senior dog (7 and up)
It works better than most people expect. Scent games and problem-solving puzzles do not ask much of the joints, and the Duranton and Horowitz finding on nosework and mood is directly relevant to an older dog whose world has got smaller.
Three rules. Skip the fast-movement games. Cut sessions to five minutes. And see a vet first if the behavior changed recently, because in an older dog what looks like stubbornness is very often pain, hearing loss or cognitive decline rather than a training gap. The course has no ready-made senior track, so the adaptation is on you.
Not yet. Buy it for week three, not day one
Profile 4: Newly adopted dog, first two to four weeks
This is the profile I see most often, and the most common mistake. A dog that just came out of a shelter is decompressing: sleeping too much or too little, not eating, hiding in a back room or following you into the bathroom. What it needs is a predictable routine, a space that belongs to it, and nothing being asked of it.
A training session with a human it does not know yet is pressure, not enrichment. From roughly week three or four, start with the scent games, because the dog can do those on its own without holding eye contact with a stranger. If you are buying today because you adopted yesterday and the house is being destroyed, your money does more in one in-person consultation than in any course.
No. Do not buy this for this dog
Profile 5: Reactive or aggressive dog, resource guarding, severe separation anxiety
Plainly: if your dog has bitten someone, growls when a person approaches its food, or destroys the door and injures itself when you leave, a $67 recorded course is not the right product and we are not going to sell it to you.
These are emotional conditions, not training gaps, and the treatment is behavior modification with somebody who can see your dog: a CPDT-KA trainer, an IAABC consultant, a CAAB, or a veterinary behaviorist (DACVB). It runs $50 to $150 an hour and it is worth every cent. Once the case is stable under professional guidance, the games come back in as enrichment, and at that point they genuinely help.
Two out of five profiles here are a "no". We could have written five yeses and made more money today. A page that recommends everything to everyone is worth nothing to anyone.
$67 one-time
