Owners join us as we teach every dog three things:
Questions first? Price, safety & common answers ↓
A multi-person team uses a low-level e-collar to eliminate curiosity and overcome prey drive toward snake scent, sight, and sound — paired with high praise to train the dog to turn around and avoid the danger.
Our Training Program →Why now · by the numbers
This is not your average rattlesnake training. It’s the full 12-station course, modeled after one of the top courses in the country — then enhanced with safely caged rattlesnakes instead of dangerous “paper-muzzled” ones.
Scent, sight & sound — every sense trained on its own.
About 30 minutes of focused one-on-one work per dog. Every sense proofed.
Every rattlesnake stays securely caged — never muzzled, never within reach.
Your dog learns to turn away before it ever sees the snake.
A permanent course in Bouquet Canyon, sessions nearly every weekend.
If your dog needs more work, come back at no cost.
Trusted by local vets & pro trainers




As seen in
The Signal · KTLA · New York Post · CBS · KHTS
★★★★★ 100+ five-star reviews
We Do One Thing
This isn’t your average course — it’s scent-work first. Your dog will avoid rattlesnakes primarily by scent — and will also run if they hear or see a snake.

A same-year refresher is included with purchase — an annual refresher is recommended after that. It's the maximum length course we can run without traumatizing your dog — giving them the most complete training available.
Trusted by professionals, veterinarians, service dog trainers, competition trainers, and pet owners alike. See who trusts us →
We Solve a Real Problem
Every rattlesnake in our course stays securely caged — never muzzled, and never within reach of your dog.
Every other full 12-station program we've found
The Snake School
Scent-work first
Your dog learns the rattlesnake’s scent on its own — at scent stations with no cage at all. Every scent station sits between identical-looking blanks: picture three rocks in a row, and only the middle one carries real rattlesnake scent. So your dog learns the snake, not the setup. Then the live rattlesnakes — securely caged with full airflow — prove it.
We do it differently, and it shows:
Real feedback from dog owners who trained with us — recapped from their post-training debriefs.
Featured on The Signal, KTLA, New York Post, CBS & KHTS
“Rattlesnake avoidance training definitely works. I have a rattlesnake in my backyard right now. My dogs saw it before I did, and stayed the heck away! Thank you guys!”
Rattlesnake Avoidance Training◆Santa Clarita, CA
A trainer and an assistant work every dog together, using the bare minimum level on one of our 3 sizes of e-collar — no dogs are ever harmed.
Together, we walk a permanently built course at our training ranch — a series of stations that each isolate one sense at a time, like sound or scent, building up to stations with multiple live snakes. Dogs are taught that snakes are "bad," and that keeping maximum distance from them is the only solution. We rely on R+ and P+ methods of operant conditioning to successfully snake train nearly all dogs.

We train your dog on the actual scent of a live rattlesnake — musk, shed skin, and cloacal secretions carried straight from the caged snake — not a urine- or feces-soaked substrate, the easier, faked signal some programs use. So a hidden snake gets detected and avoided by smell, before your dog ever sees or hears it — trained across two stations, with proofing.

As your dog approaches, we play adult and baby rattlesnake sounds — isolated, real recordings — through a hidden Bluetooth speaker — training isolated recognition and avoidance of the rattle itself. So even when your dog can't see or smell the snake, they still learn to turn away on sound alone.

For the sight stations we use muzzled non-venomous gopher snakes — both large adults and babies — so your dog learns to recognize snakes of every size and can walk right up to one on the ground, with zero risk. The rattlesnakes always stay caged. There's no such thing as a safe muzzled rattlesnake.

Your dog encounters four live rattlesnake stations — adult, juvenile, and baby, every one securely caged — building to the final den: a cluster of live rattlesnakes coiled together, securely contained, with no prompts, no cues, no corrections. When your dog turns and walks away on its own, this isn't training anymore. It's instinct.
Between the real snakes, we seed the course with decoys — a coiled hose, scattered sticks — and mimic-stations paired with treats. Your dog learns to read shape and movement, stays relaxed, and finishes the course food-motivated and confident.
& Snake Safety Officer for Film & TV
10+Years of dog training
experience
5+Years rattlesnake
wrangling
Founder of The Snake School — a better 12-station rattlesnake avoidance dog training program.
Every graduate goes home with a diploma. Any dog that needs more work returns at no cost, all season long.
Local veterinarians refer their own clients and professional trainers bring us their own animals — because preventing a rattlesnake bite (a $2,500–$5,000+ emergency) is exactly what they'd want for any dog they care about.

As someone with training experience, I was thoroughly impressed by their methodology. The setup is out in a dirt field — exactly the real-world environment where you'd actually encounter a snake. It was the ultimate test for my three crazy Jack Russells, who go after absolutely anything.

This course is clearly better than any other rattlesnake avoidance training course we've had — safer and more well thought out than what other trainers do, and the effectiveness is superior. Any way a dog encounters a rattlesnake, the Snake School gives it the best possible chance to avoid it and not be bitten.

Scott was incredibly friendly, professional, and knowledgeable. He used live rattlesnakes in a safe, controlled environment, along with scent and sound, to teach dogs to recognize and avoid the danger. It gave me confidence that my dog, Kalani, was getting realistic, effective training. I highly recommend it to anyone with a dog who hikes, camps, and lives in California.

Happy Pets Veterinary Center featured The Snake School to their clients — and brought their own team's dogs through the course.
Founder & Lead Trainer
Scott has over 10 years of dog training experience. This year alone, he's professionally rattlesnake trained hundreds of dogs at our training ranch in Santa Clarita — and every dog goes home snake-trained, even if we need to do free follow-ups. Scott trained under one of the top rattlesnake avoidance trainers in the country — and saw huge mistakes up close: the snakes weren’t safely managed, and handlers and dogs were at constant risk. So he built an even more thorough course, with higher safety standards permanently built into a major 20-acre training facility in Santa Clarita. He's also a professional rattlesnake wrangler for film and TV productions.
Read Scott's Full Story →Our 12-station course spends significantly more time with your dog, proofing each sense individually — that level of conditioning takes longer, and it's something you won't get from a $100 course.
Your same-season refresher is included at no extra cost — and our current 26% seasonal discount is applied automatically at checkout.
We are available to talk 7 days a week, and would love to chat with you. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions.