Lubbock Schutzhund Joe Cantu German Shepherd training, scammer, liar, thief, Joe Cantu Spur Texas

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.