Negative experience with Joe Cantu of the Lubbock Schutzhund Club - Page 1

I am posting this in order to share my negative experience with Joe Cantu of the Lubbock Schutzhund Club who promised to give me a refund of the $3400 dollars I spent on personal protection/schutzhund training for two dogs but now won’t take my calls. I took two female German Shepherd dogs for training on July 25th, 2014 (one was 4 years old the other 10 months old at the time). I picked them up April 19th 2015 because the older female was coming into heat and I was thinking of breeding her and I was taking the younger female to the Austin Schutzhund club conformation show (she was disqualified at the conformation show for not having a microchip even though Joe Cantu said he himself put one but that is another story). Joe Cantu promised to title both in narcotics, the older female in personal protection and the younger female in IPO (BH and IPO1). He only sent pictures of training once around October despite me asking him multiple times for pictures and videos of my dogs in training. Of course he kept giving me excuses as to why they hadn't been titled yet starting December 15th and kept pushing the date back of when they would be titled. Eventually on March 14th 2015 I went out to a training and found out that he hadn't done any bite training with the younger female who at this stage was 20 months old. All he did with the younger female while I was there was demonstrate her heeling on leash for about 5 minutes. He said he feared she wouldn't pass her BH if started on bite training though he never said this in our multiple conversations over the phone. He had the older female on the bite suit but had almost no control over her, she bit when she wanted, he gave contradicting commands and hit her on the head with a leash to try to get her to pay attention. I have video to prove this. He himself acknowledged their poor performances on March 14, 2015 and brushed them off by saying, “they have never been on this practice field, they had a bad day”. I decided to leave them there despite seeing this (my mistake in hindsight) because he was taking both to get their narcotics certification in New Mexico in about a week from March 14th 2015. He said, “I can guarantee you they will pass, if they don’t I don’t deserve to call myself a trainer” and of course, they didn't pass. I showed the video of the older female on the bite suit to several people with experience in schutzhund and personal protection. They all basically said the same thing, that Joe Cantu was a horrendous trainer who had no idea what he was doing. I also took them to the DFW schutzhund dog club where Randall Hoadley evaluated them and said if they had any training at all it was s*%$ training. I live over 7 hours away from Joe Cantu so I wasn't able to visit and check their progress as I should have which was my mistake. At the end of the day all I want is a refund of my money so I can take them to a reputable training to continue/start their training. I also want to share my experience so anyone thinking of training with him will have more information before taking their dogs to the Lubbock Schutzhund club and Joe Cantu.

Three words of advice, my friend:  Small. Claims. Court.

Yeah, it's going to be inconvenient because you'll have to file in his county, not yours, but if you really have the evidence you cite, in particular a written or videotaped evaluation from Hoadley [or better yet, if he will testify on your behalf in court], then court would be your best chance of actually receiving the restitution you seek.

Even if you get some money back from small claims court, I would think that the cost of boarding and feeding them would be deducted.

Good luck with finding anothr person to train/title the dogs. Just curious, are you not able to do the training yourself?

Even in small claims court, you'll have a hard time since it could be argued that you paid less than $100.00 per week to board 2 dogs for that period of time which is pretty cheap by any standard.

When I took the dogs I did not have the time to train them but I wanted to title them. Hindsight is 20/20 of course so lesson learned the hard way. I now have more time and I am going to join the DFW schutzhund club and learn how to train myself. Here is a link to my facebook page where I have posted a video of him "training" my female GSD....when the video was taken she had been there for 9 months

https://www.facebook.com/aleman.gsd

If the amount the OP is seeking to be reimbursed DOES include boarding fees in addition to training fees, then I agree that filing a court case would be a waste of time, because that would mean the OP was charged far less than $13/day for kenneling....I understood the $3400 to be JUST the fee for training the dogs during the time they were with the purported trainer, which I presume represents the number of hours the dogs were actively being worked in some capacity.

There is no law that determines what training is worth or for that matter IF a dog can be trained. All a scammer needs to say is they TRIED to train the dogs but the dogs weren't trainable. You can kiss your money good by....NEVER EVER send your dog to a 'trainer' to be trained. There is no law that prevents a self proclaimed 'trainer' from taking your money AND your dogs and trying and trying and trying to train them to no avail. It is upto the owner to check on progress, end the dog's stay with said 'trainer' when no progress is evident. Also, NEVER EVER pay in advance for services...the chances of getting any work done is slim when money is prepaid. Pay by the week if you feel comfortable with leaving your dog with a trainer...when no progress is made, take the dogs home when the bill is paid for that week. Also, scammers have no motivation to work when the money is prepaid. Tough lesson learned.

Yes indeed, tough lesson learned. Hopefully he won't be able to scam others

Tough lesson, but be thankful that your dogs came home. There are some that never make it home and are never heard from again when these deals go bad. :(

Good point, I meant to say that and forgot.