Part of maintaining your sanity with a dog is ensuring that they have a firm grasp of what we like to call doggy ‘life skills’. Without these skills, time spent with your dog can go from being fun and fulfilling, to awful and aggravating (ask me how I know!). These skills are an essential part of dog ownership, whether you’ve got a puppy from a breeder, or you’ve adopted a rescue.
How do we learn these skills? Through some good old fashioned training time! Puppy school and professional trainers can be part of this learning experience, of course, but there’s a lot that you can do yourself! Here at Wildhunde we don’t believe in gatekeeping essential training skills. Every owner should be empowered with the knowledge of how to teach their dog the essentials and ensure that life with their pup is enjoyable for all.
One of these fundamental life-skills (and the one we’re going to address today) is ‘loose leash walking’. Fear not: whether you’re working with a blank slate puppy, or trying to correct a seasoned leash-puller, this method will get you there!
The Fundamentals
As with any training task, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of what you are teaching your dog. At face-value, yes, you’re just teaching your dog not to pull on the leash. But we need to break it down into its most basic principles in order to determine exactly how we teach the concept to our little furry pullers.
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The first principle to focus on is your dog’s reaction to pressure: when you’re pulling the leash to try and control your dog, their natural reaction is to PULL harder! This is called the opposition reflex. It’s super annoying, but also very normal. We want to break out of that reflex and teach our dog to give in when they feel pressure, instead of pushing back.
- The second aspect of this lesson is what we like to call the ‘reward zone’. We don’t want our dog pulling, regardless of what position they’re in, so we create this ‘reward zone’ aka a hot spot of snackies. This teaches your dog that this is the place to be, where all rewards happen. We want them to understand that this is where they should hang when walking on leash.
To put it another way, if your dog is pulling and pulling in order to get closer to that tree or other dog that they wanna sniff, then that is their reward zone. They pull so they can get to it faster. So, let’s focus on how we execute these two points of training.
Setting Yourself Up for Success
The first thing before starting any training task, is to prepare yourself so that you have the best chance of success. It’s about setting yourself up to succeed, like wearing the right gear for a hike, so you don’t injure yourself immediately.
The difficulty in teaching loose-leash walking lies not in the complexity of the task, but just that so much of our time is just trying to get from A to B. As a result, there are so many moments when you might be unintentionally reinforcing bad habits (for example, letting your dog pull you from the house to the car, or car to park etc).
All these little leash moments are inadvertently rewarding your dog for pulling. As in the example mentioned, you just want to get everyone in the car and it’s just a short distance from the house to the car, so without even thinking about it, you just put a leash on and let the dog pull you to the car. However, now your dog just got rewarded for pulling. So, as far as your dog is concerned, pulling works GREAT to get what they want!
Don’t feel bad, this is so common and it’s exactly what we’re going to fix!
Does this mean you have to do loose-leash training every single time you leave the house (even when you’re running late and the kids are screaming and you’re about to have a mental breakdown)? No! Of course not. There are always going to be times when you just need to get going and you can’t afford 10 minutes to get your dog from the house to the car nicely.
So What Do We Do?
We set realistic goals, and make a routine that fits with your lifestyle. Part of a successful training routine means understanding that there are always going to be times when you aren’t able to focus on the training task, and you just need to get from A to B. If you had to focus on loose-leash walking every single time you clip the leash on? Then you’re really just setting yourself up to forget or get frustrated and make a mistake.
So, we acknowledge the times that we just need to get from point A to point B without focusing on training. We do this by using one tool for the non-training times, and another for training times. Your dog will quickly distinguish between the two, and understand that one tool (e.g. a harness) means they can freely pull, and you can get them to the destination without worrying about undermining your work. Then the other tool (e.g. flat collar) will signal that you’re going to focus on training and they need to behave on the leash!
These tools can be whatever personally works for you. We prefer a harness for these times, as you won’t have your dog practicing pressure on their neck (especially important in puppies). If you’re working with an older dog that has already learned to pull on their current gear, stick with it for now! We can address it later and eventually apply leash manners to every tool; this is just how we begin to teach the skill.
Training Time
Once you’ve chosen your training tool, and have a good little block of time (anywhere from ten to twenty minutes), then you’re ready to begin working on loose leash walking. First we begin by putting on our loose-leash walking ‘uniform’ (aka the tool we’ve chosen to signal loose-leash time). What you choose will be dependent on your dog. For us, we often opt for a fabric martingale collar and a six foot leash, so that we have a bit of extra length to work with.
Again, depending on your dog and the current state of their leash manners, this could also be the time to utilise a walking tool like a no-pull harness or a no-pull transitional leash which are designed to aid with this exact situation. These can be especially helpful if you have a larger dog that can pull you over or otherwise endanger your safety.
Step One: Giving In To Pressure
The first step is to teach our dog to understand they must give in to pressure on the leash, not fight against it.
We pick a starting point and a destination point. It shouldn’t be far, for example the length of your driveway can work for this. Slowly begin your walk towards your destination point. As your dog begins to move out in front, and you feel that tension on the leash, then slowly start to move backwards (back to starting point), in opposition to the pressure from your dog.
This will pull your dog with you, and at some point, they will give in to the pressure, and begin to follow. The very moment that tension relaxes, you need to mark that with a word (some people use a clicker) and then we give a reward!
Step Two: The Reward Zone
This step is not just about rewarding the behaviour, but creating that ‘reward zone’ we discussed earlier. You choose where you want your dog to aim for and give your reward at that spot. For loose-leash walking, you want your dog to be at your side, so that’s where we create the reward zone. This encourages your dog to return to this spot every time, as they want to be in the reward zone. Take note that we are not aiming for the dog to hit the end of the leash! This is simply about the dog walking to the pressure, giving into the pressure and then being rewarded for doing so.
Then we essentially repeat these steps until our dog learns to habitually keep the leash tension nice and loose. It can take time, and a lot of repetition (and a lot of patience!), but these are the essential basics for teaching loose-leash walking to your dog!
Quick Tip: If your dog is a connoisseur of fine treats and responds well to food incentives, then we recommend keeping treats handy in a trainer’s pouch in order to make the process seamless and quick. Keep treats to small, quick bite-size, such as Eureka air-dried treats.
This is all very much the basic template for teaching loose-leash walking on its own, and is perfectly applicable for puppies or dogs without any other outstanding concerns. This training method can definitely be combined with other behavioural training, such as reactivity, but we highly recommend working with a qualified professional in such cases as the method may require modification in its approach.
If you’re seeking a professional to help you in such instances, please let us know and we are more than happy to help you find a trusted trainer in your local area within Australia.
Happy training!
