Leash walking can be difficult, embarrassing and sometimes painful.
If you’ve ever been dragged down the street by a dog, you know what I’m talking about.
What most people don’t know is that the type of leash you use is important. Not only the type but also the length.
You see, I’ve seen many dog owners try to teach their dogs to walk on leash with fishing pole leashes – also known as the flexi-leash.
Worst leash on the planet for teaching loose leash walking.
Next is the short leash. I’ve seen plenty of people use a short, three to four foot leash to gain control.
Wrong again.
The right leash to use, in my humble but accurate opinion, is a six foot, leather leash.
Let me splain why.
First, leather is very easy on the hands if you have a strong dog.
Second, you need six feet to properly get control of your dog because the secret to leash walking is making sure there is ZERO tension between you and your dog.
When your dog feels pressure in the leash, he will pull away from you. It’s called opposition reflex. The more pressure you apply, the harder your dog will pull away from you.
Once your dog starts to pull away from you, forget about yanking a choke chain or forcing your dog to stay with you because the training then becomes difficult and is not much fun.
All you really need to do is change direction when your dog pulls.
Once you learn to do this, the days of your dog pulling you down the street are behind you.
You can see how it’s done at one of our dog training classes.
You can get more information here:
Best,
Eric
So Hurley was our “we leraned from the other two, we’re going to do it right this time” puppy. Yeah. So what have I leraned from so-called doing it right with him? Well, we didn’t give him alone time in the first year of his life so now we deal with some mild separation anxiety (if you call busting through screens mild). And I trained too much in one environment and so he’s super well-behaved in one or two environments but struggles to listen to us in new places. So I would make sure those first few months of training are in as many different locations as possible and would practice alone time.And when I accomplish these goals with a new pup, guess what? There will likely be something else I screwed up that I learn for the next one. That’s the good and the bad about dogs – we keep learning from our experiences with them but we never get it 100% right. Or at least I haven’t. Yet.