About Pup Class Research
Who We Are
Pup Class is run by a small team of dog owners and animal behavior enthusiasts who decided to do something most training brands don't: actually test everything on our own dogs first.
Our team includes everyday pet owners, amateur researchers, and professional scientists who share one conviction — that the best dog training advice should be grounded in published behavior science, not tradition, marketing, or guesswork.
The Science Behind It
Every method, exercise, and recommendation on this site traces back to peer-reviewed research in animal behavior and learning theory. We don't publish a claim we can't cite.
Our scientific review is led by a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University whose work has appeared in Nature. He is not a dog trainer — he is a researcher, and that is the point. His role is to ensure that the science we cite is real, interpreted correctly, and not oversimplified beyond recognition. Dog training advice on the internet has a long history of misrepresenting the underlying research; we take that problem seriously.
How Our Courses Are Built
We try things. On our own dogs. With methods that have published evidence behind them. When something works consistently — not anecdotally, but across different dogs, breeds, and problem behaviors in our team — we build a structured course around it.
That means everything you find here has been:
- Tested by real dog owners in real homes, not curated from success stories
- Vetted against the research literature by our scientific lead
- Refined by failure — if a method didn't hold up, it didn't make it into a course
What We Are Not
We are not a celebrity trainer brand. There is no guru, no signature method named after a person, no proprietary philosophy. We don't use shock collars, prong collars, or dominance-based techniques — not because they're controversial, but because the research on aversive methods is clear: they increase stress hormones, suppress behavior without building understanding, and raise the risk of aggression (Mills & Clarke, 2002; Ziv, 2017; Vieira de Castro et al., 2020).
We are a team that got frustrated with the gap between what behavioral science actually shows and what gets sold to dog owners. So we closed it ourselves.
Questions about our methods or citations? Use the contact page — we read every message.