Shane is an animal person through and through — and his specialty is training dogs in rattlesnake avoidance. Over the past six years he has trained more than 1,000 dogs to recognize and avoid live rattlesnakes, drawing on a lifetime spent reading animals on a working ranch.
The Snake School isn't a dog-training operation that figured out snakes. It's the other way around — and it shows in the dog's response.
Built from what works — and what doesn't. Scott trained under California's most popular rattlesnake avoidance program, made the course safer, and built a team where everyone is both a rattlesnake person and a dog person.
Lead Trainer Shane Armstrong is an extensively experienced provider of rattlesnake avoidance training. Cary Quashen is the most trusted rattlesnake wrangler in Santa Clarita Valley.
Shane has spent his life around animals. The ranch he runs in Southern California is a real working operation — cattle, pigs, goats, horses, and the venomous wildlife that comes with the territory.
He also trains livestock guardian dogs — the dogs that live and work in this exact environment, protecting livestock from predators, snakes, and everything in between. There is no closer match for what we're teaching pet dogs in our rattlesnake avoidance course than what Shane already does for a living.
A trainer who works inside a fenced obedience yard sees one slice of canine behavior. A handler who trains LGDs and runs a working ranch sees how dogs read every animal in the environment — including the ones that bite back. Rattlesnake avoidance is one of those skills you can't fake your way through. The dog has to actually understand what they're looking at.
Six years of doing this — day in, day out — has refined Shane's eye for the small signals that tell you a dog has locked in the lesson. That's not a credential you can earn in a classroom.
It sounds impossible. It isn't — it's just what happens when a dog learns rattlesnake avoidance from an actual rattlesnake, run by an actual rattlesnake handler. Every dog Shane has ever trained, over six years of doing this, has stayed snake-safe in real-world encounters. To our knowledge, not one has been bitten after going through the course.
Every Saturday at our private Santa Clarita ranch — a multi-station, scent-first rattlesnake avoidance course built around the standard you just read about.
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