Advice From a Lawyer Friend

How to develop a contract for your Dog training Business

How to Create a Contract for Your Dog Training Business

Brent and Mariano reached out to their lawyer friend to answer some legal questions on how to best protect your business and reputation here are their answers.

Disclaimer From Lawyer

“Of the top, I should be clear that I’m a generalist lawyer licensed in California offering some perspective on the law. I’m not giving legal advice; the things I share do not form an attorney-client relationship; and if you would like or need legal advice, I encourage you to contact an attorney and share the specifics of your situation and concerns.”

– Lawyer Friend

What is the purpose of having a training contract?

There are at least two purposes.

First, it’s an opportunity to be clear about the services you will and won’t offer, your prices, and your boundaries. The overwhelming – and I mean vast, vast – majority of contracts do not end in disagreement over the deal, let alone in a court. That does not mean the contract didn’t matter or wasn’t important.

People can interpret advertising or your conversations promoting yourself to mean all kinds of things you might not intend: what results you do or more likely can’t guaranty, what kind of tardiness you’ll tolerate, whether you’ll stay open late if they want to pick up the dog up after work, etc. A contract is an opportunity to set all of that straight in one document that controls the situation if there’s a disagreement or misunderstanding.

Non-lawyers can find using contracts a little intimidating or unpleasantly formal, but in this sense, a contract is just a good business practice:

  1. It’s writing down the basics of what you’ve agreed so everyone knows what the deal is and doesn’t get angry over a misunderstanding later. 
  2. It can function as an order form for you, a record of exactly which services – and how often – the client has requested. A client may misremember that they asked for a particular extra service on the phone. If you have a contract and they didn’t tick off the box for that service on the contract, that is not a fight. That is an opportunity to go “well, we didn’t check that box on the contract, but I’d love to offer you that – it is an extra $20 per day – if you’d like to add that, just send me an email saying you’d like to add it.”
  3. If a client does wind up annoyed with you, a clear contract often prevents a fight. We’ve all been mad at a service provider, gone back to the contract, and gone “oh…I see…I’m just wrong. Fine.”

And before I move on to the second purpose of a contract, I’ll say this: the things you want to be clear about, the basics of the deal, should stand out in the contract. Certainly, the prices and which services you want to offer should be prominent. But so should any terms that people always ignore or that have turned out to be a pain in your butt in running your business. You know what those are – use the contract to help yourself.

If people are forever cancelling on you later than the 48-hour window you ask for, put that rule in big bold print high up in the contract…not way down in a bunch of fine print. We all intuitively skim service contracts for the critical terms. Make it easy for folks to find and see the things that are critical for you or that tend to go wrong. 

The second purpose of having a contract is what most people think. It limits your warranties. It helps protect you from liability. It can make the client responsible for your legal fees in the event you have to enforce the contract, and the like. We’ll talk more about all of that in detail, but I did want to point out that all of that is secondary and – while important – very rarely comes into play. For the most part, a contract is an opportunity for clarity about a deal that will probably go just fine as long as everyone understands it up front.

What if the potential client disagrees with specific stipulations of the contract?

I think non-lawyer folks are terrified of changing any terms in a form contract.

I’d look at it a different way: If you still want the business when they want to change a term, it’s fine to edit a portion of the contract that you *fully understand,* but I wouldn’t mess with any terms you don’t fully understand. 

If you usually charge $60 a session but are happy to sell to a particular client for $50, you can edit a copy of the document to say $50 for them. You know what that means. If you don’t generally stay open late for all your clients to pick up after work, but you’re up for it for one client, you can edit the pickup deadline listed for them. You get what that does.

But I bet you don’t understand enough to be comfortable messing with any terms about liability or paying lawyers’ fees, so don’t do that.

I should add one more thing here: It’s up to you; some folks in business keep a form contract and just won’t touch it for simplicity’s sake, while some tweak it regularly client to client. But if you start editing contracts for particular clients, you have to remember you did that for that particular client and behave accordingly. You need a system to keep that in mind.

A common way businesses screw up is to have a form contract that enables them to treat everyone the same…and then some salesperson, trying to make more deals for commission, starts tweaking little bits of the contract without wanting to report that up. 

One day, a client from that salesperson will ask where in the hell their Saturday delivery is, and your operations people will say “we don’t do Saturday deliveries – company-wide policy.” But you go back and look at that particular copy of your form contract, and you know what? Your representative did agree to Saturday on that one, and no one told ops.

So, if you’re going to start fiddling with standard terms that you do understand client-to-client, make sure you and anyone who works for you knows they’ve been fiddled with.

How enforceable are non-compete agreements?

That depends where you are. In California – and this is a bit unusual – they are just by and large not enforceable. That’s true even if you’re employed by a company out of state. And that’s also true for non-solicitation agreements in California. Note: a non-solicitation agreement is narrower and prohibits you from soliciting other employees or clients of your former employer. But it’s still generally unenforceable in California.

There are some exceptions in California: for example, if you own part of a dog business and sell it to someone – you, you as a personality, may be part of the value of the business. Or you may be selling the goodwill you built up for the business, in which case a noncompete may be upheld. But if there’s no equity involved and it’s in California, the Attorney General of California just reminded us it’s not enforceable

Now, lots of companies include non-compete terms anyway. They may use form contracts all over the country, and that term may work in most other places, so they don’t bother to edit it for California specifically. 

But just because a term is in your contract with a national company doesn’t mean it’s enforceable where you are sitting. Don’t trust that a multi-state employer has had the time or bothered to make sure everything in their contract would work where you are. That’s expensive. Why would they? If a term works legally in 40 states, and half the people in the other 10 states just follow it without checking, what’s the incentive to not just leave that term in everywhere?

To be clear, that’s California. And while I’m a California lawyer, I have litigated elsewhere. Other parts of the country have different rules about non-compete terms. As far as I know, they are more commonly allowed than not. 

But nearly every state that allows them requires them to be something like reasonable in time and geographic scope given the nature of the employment. In most places, if you bring in a cardiac surgeon on a two-year contract that is extendable indefinitely, you can put in a one-year noncompete within fifty miles of your hospital. But you can’t make the non-compete 10 years and all over the United States. 

It’s tough to get more specific than that without a particular state and situation in mind. Even within a state, what’s reasonable tends to be a case-by-case determination if it’s on the line. If you’re worried about a non-compete wherever you’re sitting, please look up the rules where you are or, better, get advice – it can be really different across state lines.

Can a dog trainer be held liable if a client’s dog bites someone during, or after completion of, a paid training program? Should this verbiage be in your contract?

So, you have to put together a few different considerations to answer this question. And I’ll note that the rules can be different outside of California. 

First, California is a strict liability state when it comes to dog bites. That means the owner is responsible for a dog biting almost no matter what. If the dog bites someone on public property, or someone who is lawfully on private property – even not your own – you’re on the hook as the dog’s owner. That’s true even if the dog has shown no prior signs of aggression. You may be familiar with other states that have a “one-bite” rule – i.e. you’re strictly liable only when you’re on notice that the dog has bitten in the past. Not so in Cali.

It is reasonable to remind folks in the contract that they are responsible for any damage caused by their dog to humans or property, whether when the dog is in your care or after. And they will be.

Second, however, the fact that an owner is strictly liable for the dog bite does not mean a trainer cannot also be sued. 

I think this confuses folks: the fact that one party is strictly liable does not mean another party might not be strictly liable or liable for negligence. If a member of the public falls at a public park that’s undergoing repairs, they are going to sue the city, but they’re also going to sue the contractor who was doing the work and maybe the individual supervisor. Two or a lot more parties can be on the hook until the hurt person’s damages are paid, and those parties then have to sort out who pays more of less of that liability between themselves and under the law…after the hurt person just gets fully paid.

Two additional points on how liability for a dog trainer for a bite might go:

  • There are local ordinances – Beverly Hills has one – that make anyone controlling or having care of an animal also strictly liable for any damage to people or property that animal harms. In Beverly Hills, while the animal is in your care, you are in the same position as the owner. You are just as on the hook, period, unless some exception like trespassing applies.
  • Further, even where there isn’t a local ordinance making you strictly liable like an owner, you might be liable for negligence. In very general terms, negligence comes up when you fail to exercise the care a reasonable person would in the circumstances of what you’re doing. Where you’re providing specialized services, you have to exercise the care a reasonable specialist would.
    • Dog training is a profession. It has standards. It has best practices. You have a whole podcast about them. My guess is that a person skilled in the art of dog training doesn’t let a dog they know nothing about off leash in a dog park on the first day. Conversely, they might let the dog off leash if it’s the 10th time they’ve been to the dog park without incident and the dog has interacted positively with other dogs in a controlled environment in the past. That then becomes a factual/expert witness dispute about whether you followed the standard of care in your profession. And yes, that does mean that being more careful than folks on average in your profession is a good way to protect yourself.

Finally, as for liability after a training program, when you’re not in control of the dog and it bites…that would be a tough claim unless you made some kind of representation the dog would behave itself from that point forward…or if you misrepresented something else. 

So you have to be very careful how you couch anything related to the efficacy of your training. That should be framed as hopes that the dog will behave itself – aspirations. Or that you’ve had positive results in the past, assuming you have. Explicitly predicting how a particular animal will behave may put you on the hook. It can be treated as a misrepresentation.

The same goes for your qualifications, and for the amount of training you do or have done with the dog. Misrepresenting either of those may implicate you in a dog’s later behavior if the owner relied on those representations. 

And if you’re going to get into the business of taking on reactive or dangerous dogs and/or certifying them in any way, that’s a whole other story of waivers and the like. I would definitely get specific advice from a specialist lawyer on that.

But it is otherwise reasonable to include in your contract that you cannot guarantee improvements in the dog’s behavior and cannot guarantee any improvements will continue on in the future. I’m sure you’re good at training, but you’re working with animals that have their own minds on how to be. Don’t say you know for sure how they’re going to behave in the future because you don’t. 

If a client's dog bites you and it requires the ER and stitches....who pays?

Well, there’s the law as it stands – the default if you say nothing in your contract – and then there’s what happens if you put a term in your contract that changes the baseline.

There is an exception to the strict liability rule in California for dog owners and dog bites. It’s called the Veterinarian’s Rule, but it applies to more than just veterinarians. It’s based on the idea of “assumption of risk”. That’s a broad idea in law with many applications, but it’s relevant here.

You’re choosing to do an activity – here, for a living – that has inherent risks in it. You can’t sue someone when one of those risks plays out, after you’ve chosen that living. This same idea is why a firefighter can’t sue a homeowner when they respond to a fire and get hurt. You decided to be a firefighter. Very noble and essential thing to do, but it does change the way the law treats you if you get hurt by a fire you ran to.

If you’re going to make a living that involves putting thermometers in a dog’s butt, when you can’t explain to a dog why you’re about put something in its butt, you assume the risk a dog’s going to object – maybe rather strongly – and bite you. If you’re going to make a living trying to train dogs whose owners come to you because of some behavioral problems, you assume the risk you’ll get bit.

This rule – the Veterinarian’s rule – applies to dog walkers, groomers, vet techs, etc. It’s not about the prestige of what you do; it’s about whether you should reasonably expect exposure to dog bites as a natural part of what you’re up to.

There is an important exception to the Veterinarian’s Rule. If the dog owner:

  1. knew or should have known their dog was dangerous, and
  2. failed to tell you that before you agreed to work with the dog

then you may still have a claim under the law that the owner is liable. (As an aside, keep in mind that if somebody *does* tell you that, it makes it a lot easier for you to be found negligent if that dog bites or hurts someone while in your care. That puts you on notice.)

Because of this, I would definitely include a checkbox in your contract that the owner has represented to you that the dog has not bitten anyone or been the subject of any notices by authorities in the past. If they won’t check that box, ask them for an email explaining what’s happened, and then make your call from there knowing the story. That’s probably a basic term, regardless of how sophisticated your operation is, because it really impacts the dynamic on who’s at risk. 

Now, you can change the Veterinarian’s Rule by contract. You can state that the dog owner will be responsible for the costs of any damage to property or injury to people, including reasonable medical expenses for you and your staff, while the dog is in your care. You could also add compensation for loss of income while you or your staff are injured if you like.

What are some recommended stipulations to have in a general dog training contract?

I think it’s important to keep in mind what kinds of disagreements most often come up, and which are rarer. There may be some super rare situations that you’ve never heard of coming up that just aren’t addressed by your contract. But it should speak to the things that do tend to come up.

First, I would guess the most common disagreement is folks not wanting to pay because they don’t see whatever improvement they were hoping for in the dog.

I would include a term something along the lines of “No warranties, express or implied: You acknowledge that dog training involves working with animals, and despite our efforts, we cannot provide any warranties or guarantees that your pet’s behavior will change or improve as a result of our services. We accept no liability for your dog’s behavior while under our control or in the future.”

A note on the “implied” warranty thing: It’s not enough to just say nothing about warranties. Some warranties are implied unless you disclaim them. For example, if you have a stand that sells surfboards by a particular beach, you are likely implicitly warranting your surfboards work for that beach. And if there’s a beach across the street that’s way too intense for the material your surfboards are made of, you’ve gotta tell people that or be on the hook if they reasonably assume your boards work for both of the beaches you’ve set up between. 

Lay folks aren’t necessarily familiar with what dog training can and can’t do. The safest thing from a liability perspective – and the right thing in a customer-service business – is to be really clear about that. 

If you do want to provide some kind of guarantee in the contract, I would get advice on that. You could presumably limit your liability to just the agreed price of training, but you’d have to be a little sophisticated about that or – alternatively – just make a judgment call after you’ve done the training if you want to let somebody off the hook.

Second, I would guess another common disagreement is over folks thinking that you agreed in conversation to something different than the contract says, either before or after contracting. You should protect yourself against that using something called a “merger” or “integration” clause. That’s uppity legal speak for a clause that says the contract contains everything you’ve agreed to, regardless of other stuff you’ve said.  

An example would be: “The parties intend this statement of their agreement to constitute the complete, exclusive, and fully integrated statement of their agreement. As such, it is the sole expression of their agreement, and they are not bound by any other agreements of whatever kind or nature, unless made expressly in writing after the date of this agreement.” 

This protects you against someone saying “sure, we had a contract, but she promised me other stuff before or after on the phone.” And the last bit about modification in writing afterward leaves the door open to amendment in writing – I think you do want that. 

For example, the situation we talked about where somebody meant to order an extra service off you but just forgot to tick the box. Get them to send an email asking for it, or send them an email asking them to confirm they want to add that. That’s a writing after the fact and counts, and I think you do want that one thing to count – deals need to be updated sometimes when both parties mean for them to be.

Third, there are other terms to consider. I would include a limitation of liability clause. Here’s an example of one:  

“The Owner agrees, to the fullest extent permitted by law, to limit the liability of [trainer] to the Owner for any and all claims, losses, costs, expenses, or damages of any nature whatsoever, including attorney and expert-witness fees and costs, from any cause or causes, so that the total aggregate liability of the [trainer] to the Owner shall not exceed [the fees set forth in this contract]. It is intended that this limitation apply to any and all liability or causes of action however alleged or arising, unless otherwise specifically prohibited by law.”

Will that always work? No. But it is worth including. The most common circumstance where it doesn’t work is intentional misconduct. You can’t include that clause, let someone’s dog starve to death, and then say that clause means you’re only stuck with the training fees. But it will typically work for run of the mill negligence.

Fourth, I do think it’s important to include a clause reserving the right to administer veterinary care in the event an animal is sick or injured and to pass along those costs to the owner. Obviously, try to get in touch with the owner and ask their preferences, but you need to be able to get an animal emergency care and not be on the hook for the bill thereafter. You don’t want that worry to slow you down and to then have the owner go “what in the world…why weren’t you more proactive”, and more importantly, you just don’t want to be thinking about that with a hurt dog you want to take care of as a person who really cares about dogs.

Fifth, there are the other terms we’ve talked about regarding the veterinarian’s rule, representations about whether the dog has bitten, and the like. You could also indicate that the contract is subject to the terms and conditions page, and any updates, on your website. That’s pretty sophisticated/complicated for a dog training contract, but businesses often do that so that they can keep up to date with changes in law. That would depend on the scale of what you’re doing and if that would be more helpful or confusing for you. You could also consider an arbitration clause – that’s a lot to go into here, but there’s good information online.

Finally, I should note I’m keeping this a little bare bones for small scale dog training businesses. There’s plenty more you would do if you were running a multi-state, multi-location business. You might have a choice of law provision that indicates which state’s law will apply. You might have provisions setting forth how notice will work. And a lot more. You’ll see some of that if you just Google example training contracts.

Are there reasonable limitations or deal-breakers to include in a contract? (EX: if a client hasn’t completed their follow-up training lessons should the trainer still be required to follow through with their guarantees?)

You know, I really wouldn’t get into the business of guarantees or warranties lightly, regardless of what an owner does. The problem is that – while they may encourage an owner to buy your services – they may put you on the hook for a lot more than just whether a dog owner pays you.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to include obligations for the owner in the contract that you need fulfilled for your services to work. You can include, “you agree in purchasing the services to commit to” etc etc. 

And it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to let yourself off the hook for performing future services if the client isn’t living up to their end of the bargain. Something along the lines of: “If client fails to participate in the training program as set forth above, trainer reserves the right to cancel the training contract at any time” or with three days’ notice or whatever works for you.

But a word on that: if you are going to do anything other than just pro-rate your services when cancelling a contract – i.e., you paid for five…I’m quitting after three…I’m only charging you 3/5ths of the fee – you have to be careful. Additional penalties on top of that, say charging for the 4th session even though it didn’t happen yet, is a form of liquidated damages. That is, specifying in advance what the damages to you are for someone else breaching a contract. In California, and likely most other places, those have to be a reasonable estimate of how much you were actually harmed.

And that’s what you’re doing when you say folks have to cancel 48 hours before or you’ll charge them anyway. It’s reasonable to think you can’t rebook that spot, so you were damaged in losing getting paid for that time. But what if it’s six months advance cancellation or you have to pay for all dog training sessions? Probably not reasonable. Probably easy for you to rebook six months out. $1k extra for any cancelled session when a session costs $150? Again, probably not reasonably tied to some loss you suffered because of the cancellation.

Where can trainers go to find help building a contract for themselves or their businesses?

I did find a website called dogbitelaw.com where a Beverly Hills attorney named Kenneth Phillips has put together guides, webinars, standard contracts, and the like that you can purchase for modest fees. I do not know the lawyer. I can just say he’s licensed in good standing in California, and the free content seems reasonable to me. It’s worth looking at.

There are also other websites out there with example contracts. You could have a look at those. Or go to a few big dog training website sand get to the point where you see their contract – that’s fine/not stealing trade secrets or anything. They’re showing that to the public. You can just copy-paste contract provisions you come across that make sense to you.

What I would definitely do is look at a few of these things to get a sense of common terms. Don’t just grab one template and assume it fits you. Talk to other dog trainers and see what they include. And you can always retain a lawyer if you want somebody to put materials together for you. 

What are the laws around negligence?

I talked about this a bit earlier. There are municipalities that just make you strictly liable – that is, no need to prove negligence – for what a dog does when it’s under your care or control.

Beyond that, negligence boils down to the care a reasonable person would exercise in the circumstances. It’s different where you’re providing a professional service – something with best practices and standards. Dog training is that. Then the care that a reasonable person skilled in that profession would exercise sets the standard for you. 

It is hard to just lay out what that means in every circumstance. Negligence law is intentionally flexible and fact-specific. If dog trainer negligence went to trial, there would likely be expert witnesses on both sides. One side would say “no dog trainer would *ever* do what happened” and the other would say “this is a super common practice in dog training for any practical trainer.” It’s then up to the fact finder (jury or judge depending on the case) to decide what to believe. 

But the best way to protect yourself in advance, not knowing what might come up, is to be at least as careful as other dog trainers would be in any given circumstance. Definitely keep track of trends and best practices in the industry – which is helpful for a lot of reasons – so you know if you’re doing something really different than the other people who do what you do.

I do want to reiterate though: You should require owners to represent that a dog has not bitten or gotten into trouble with authorities in the past, and if they tell you the dog has, then it’s a different ball game. The fact that a dog has been violent in the past gets baked into the circumstances that determine whether you behaved reasonably – what your standard of care is – if something goes wrong. 

What level of protection does a contract provide?

It really depends on the contract term. 

On one hand, if you include a liquidated damages clause where the owner has to pay for ten lessons even if you cancel after the first one – it’s not much protection if you go to court. Although some folks will just pay, a court likely won’t enforce that.

On the other hand, if you make an owner represent the dog has not bitten anyone in the past and they do it, it protects you quite a bit in a lot of scenarios.

In the middle, you can make it the owner’s responsibility to pay for any veterinarian bills while in your care. If some pre-existing condition of the dogs expresses itself while in your care, you’ll likely be protected. If you throw the dog off a deck, they’ll probably win that your intentional misconduct makes you liable for the broken leg bills. 

Regardless, you really should have a clear contract even if you don’t expect things to go wrong. If nothing else, it’s just clear communication of the services. And it might wind up doing you a lot of good if something does go wrong. 

Since we’re talking about it, I’ll add two other things that would help protect you:

First, you should consider incorporating your business. I can actually be stronger on that: you should incorporate when you can. Make a limited liability corporation and use its name in your contracts and the like. 

What’s the point? Well, it protects your personal assets. We created incorporation a very long time ago to encourage people to go into business and to take risks. 

Think of shipping in the days of wooden ships with square sails. Very expensive thing to build; valuable cargo goes on it; and a whole lot of them sink. 

Before you could limit your liability by incorporating, your business going under could mean losing your house and winding up in debtor’s prison (which we also got rid of…Google the prehistory of the concept of bankruptcy if you’re interested). What incorporating does is limit your liability – in most circumstances – to whatever the value of the *business* is…as opposed to the value of absolutely everything you own. You can push the business into bankruptcy without giving up everything you personally own.

Incorporating is not terribly complicated if you have Google. There are also services that will incorporate a business for you for a nominal fee.

You do have to treat the business as a separate entity with its own interests and money for incorporation to work. There’s a concept called “piercing the corporate veil”, which just means ignoring that someone incorporated where they just treat the corporation as themselves. It’s a bit much to go into here, but you can’t generally do things like use the corporate credit card to pay for your vacation. The business is separate from you as a person, and you have to keep clean and logical boundaries on paying yourself from the business and such. 

Second, and this is also a more complicated subject to get into the details of: shop for dog trainer’s insurance. Places like The Hartford offer it. It covers many of the types of liability we’ve talked about here. Critically, you can be right about what happened and in a position to ultimately win a lawsuit…but not able to afford an attorney in the meantime to help you. In effect, you may just lose anyway. Insurance may get you access to a lawyer to prove you’re right.

Insurance may also cover things you’re not thinking about – you are running a business subject to all the general risks of a business, in addition to the particular risks of dog training. For example, insurance can cover liability if your client’s personal information gets stolen because your laptop is hacked. 

I of course haven’t priced this out and don’t know the normal costs/revenues of a dog training operation, but you should Google this and consider it. If you’re listening to me blather on for an hour, it would probably give you a lot of the peace of mind you’re seeking

What are some off-the-cuff protective clauses a trainer should consider including for boarding, private in-home lessons, and group classes?

Certainly all the things we’ve already discussed. And then there are some additional items to consider.

First, the limitation on liability to the value of the contract makes sense in all of these contexts.

Second, for boarding, there’s more at stake. You should look at standard boarding contracts – they are fairly long. You should definitely require proof of current vaccinations. It may also mean that more money is at stake for you in long-term boarding. You could include a term where you have a lien on the dog if they do not pay you.

You also need to know any special circumstances of the dog. That’s true if you’re training the dog too, but it seems even more important if boarding day to day. The client needs to specifically write out any particular feeding regimen, medications, pre-existing injuries, or similar, and to provide you with contact information for the pet’s veterinarian. The terms where you are entitled to seek veterinary care for the dog obviously also become even more important if you’re going to be caring for the dog for an extended period of time.

Third, for group lessons, you’ve now brought a bunch of folks together on the at least implied representation that it’s a safe thing to do. You can poke around looking at how other trainers approach this, but here’s an example:

“I do hereby waive and release, [trainer], from any and all liabilities of any nature. I agree to take complete responsibility for the action of my dog, and myself and family members, before, after and during class. At no time will the instructor be liable or responsible for the actions of myself, my dog or any other person who accompanies me to class.

I understand that attendance and participation in any training program is not without risk to myself and/or guests who may attend. I further understand that my personal dog is also at risk, during training, on the property during training, or that I may bring home an illness due to working around other dogs.

I agree to take full and total responsibility for my dog at all times. I hereby waive and release [trainer], the property or business the training is located at, all owners and other animals in attendance, and any of the above mentioned employees, owners, and agents from any and all liability of any nature for injury or damage which I or my dog may suffer, including specifically, but not without limitation, any injury or damage resulting from the action of any dog, and I expressly assume the risk of any such damage or injury while attending the training session, class or seminar, while supervising or interacting with a dog while on the grounds or surrounding area thereto. In consideration of my attendance and participation in training classes, I waive the right from any and all claims or claims by any member of my family or any other person accompanying me during the course as a result of any action by any dog, including my own.”

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