Training Software That Speaks Your Methodology

A trainer evaluating Pet Ops once asked, early in a demo, whether our board-and-train and behavior tracking matched her science-based protocols. At the time, the honest answer was no. The fields on screen used a different vocabulary than the one her intake conversation used, and that mismatch was enough to end the trial before it started. Nothing about the underlying software was wrong for her — the words in front of her were.

Every program agrees on a foundation: criteria, a marker, a cue, the 3 Ds of distance, duration, and distraction, and fluency as the goal of a well-run rep. Past that shared foundation, the vocabulary splits hard, and the split is not cosmetic — it signals which camp wrote the software. Methodology support is a sales-qualification feature, not a nice-to-detail-later. It decides whether a trainer keeps evaluating or closes the tab.

Pet Ops ships three seeded methodology packs: Neutral, Balanced, and Science-Based. Switching a dog's pack does not just relabel a dropdown — it changes which fields exist on that dog's training record, because a Balanced session and a Science-Based session document genuinely different things.

Neutral is the default: the 3 Ds, skill stages, and homework, with none of the camp-specific fields below. It is the right starting point for a program that hasn't standardized on a single methodology, or that mixes clients across both.

app.petops.app/admin/training/packs

Switch a dog to the Balanced pack and the record reshapes around how balanced programs actually document a session: working level per dog per context, a distance ladder for proofing a behavior further from the trainer and further into distraction, and tool tracking that logs prong, e-collar, and leash-pop use alongside pressure on/off timing. A correction is logged against the criteria that triggered it, not dropped into a free-text note where it loses that context.

Curriculum presets follow the same logic: 2-week and 4-week board-and-train templates that walk a stay from place-command foundations through off-leash proofing, in the order a balanced program actually teaches it.

Switch to Science-Based and the record reshapes again: ABC (antecedent-behavior- consequence) logs for capturing reactivity between sessions, threshold tracking and reinforcement rate, desensitization/counter-conditioning (DS/CC) protocol parameters with antecedent arrangement as its own field, a written management plan, and LIMA escalation documentation for cases that need to justify moving up the hierarchy.

Aversive-tool fields — prong, e-collar, and leash-pop logging — are not just discouraged in this pack. They are hidden entirely. That isn't a policy line in a manual; it's the actual field set a Science-Based trainer sees on screen, and it's the clearest proof the neutrality on this page is real rather than marketing.

The Science-Based field set: threshold distance, reinforcement, DS/CC step — and no tool-logging fields anywhere on the form.

An obedience skill can carry a fluency level because a sit either holds or it doesn't. A reactivity case cannot be scored the same way. Behavior-modification skills in Pet Ops are tracked by stage and trend — improving, holding, regressing — never by a letter grade.

A dog working through leash reactivity does not get a "B+" on a report card. That framing is the lost-prospect problem from the top of this page, in miniature: reducing a behavior case to a grade tells a science-based trainer everything they need to know about whether the software understands the work, and the answer would be no.

Neutral, Balanced, and Science-Based cover most programs, but they are not the ceiling. Every field, label, and pack is defined in the admin UI — no code, no API calls, no ticket to us. If your program runs a hybrid vocabulary, or a methodology of your own devising, you build it the same way we built the first three.