Tips for teaching your dog to walk nicely on a leash

In order to teach your dog to walk nicely on a leash, whether it is a puppy or old, you must first build a relationship with your dog and at the same time teach the dog to give its owner contact in various disturbing environments and teach the dog self-control.

To begin with, you must remember that you cannot train to walk nicely on a leash all the time. Therefore, we must give the dog the opportunity to take time off and be a dog. One way to do this is by equipping the dog with a harness and a wide plain collar. When we train, the leash is in the collar and when the dog is free, the leash is in the harness. We do this as it is more appropriate for the dog to pull on a harness than on a collar. You can also use a regular short leash for training and a long fixed leash for when the dog is off.

Dogs are curious and want to investigate the environment around them, therefore they will naturally gravitate towards what they are attracted to. Here, as the owner, you must ensure that your dog does not succeed in pulling the owner forward to what he wants. We must instead teach it to follow us. Do not pull on the leash or scold, this would destroy the dog's motivation and joy.

Good things to remember while learning:

Motivation: Without motivation we cannot train a dog. We must therefore make sure to keep the dog's motivation up when we train a new exercise with it. We can do this by using the right rewards, but also by making training fun instead of strict. Do not train too often, this can cause the dog to lose motivation.

Distance yourself from what makes the dog pull: It can be a person, another dog, a bird, etc. By distancing ourselves from the disturbance, we make it easier for the dog to work with us, and thus we build on successes instead of failure.

Reward OFTEN: By rewarding often during learning, it will pay off for the dog to walk nicely instead of pulling. Remember this is a learning process that we are in the process of and which you will have to train for the next long while. BUT when the dog has learned it, we can start to reduce the amount of treats.

Reward with something of high value: Use extra delicious treats every time the difficulty level increases. If you want to train to walk nicely on a leash in a new environment, perhaps in a park the dog has not been to before, or on a street with lots of traffic, then the dog must have something of high value to keep the motivation to train with the owner .

Reward for contact both verbally and with treats: When you are out for a walk, even if you are not training with your dog. So reward EVERY TIME your dog looks at you and checks in. This means that you will see that behavior more often, as the dog gets something out of looking up at you when you go for a walk. This means that you will be able to more easily establish contact in difficult situations and thereby be able to train walking nicely on a leash.

The dog does not need to greet everyone: Remember that your dog does not need to greet everyone on the walk. If you let your dog greet all dogs and people it meets from the start, it will think that this is the rule and not the exception. Not all dogs and people want to greet either, so to avoid standing with a dog that you can't take on until it has greeted, I recommend that you teach it not to greet everyone. But instead you have some well-known dog friends and people it can greet and that it knows. -

Finally, remember that your dog must also be allowed to sniff and have fun. I recommend that you can use a leash for pleasant walks so that the dog has a lot more freedom. Also use a short cord for when training.

Back to the two exercises, contact and self-control.

The contact exercise

In short, the contact exercise involves rewarding your dog every time it looks at its owner to check in. Start this exercise in a familiar environment, i.e. at home in the living room or out in the garden. When the dog has become good at giving its owner contact at home, you can start practicing the exercise outside on the trip.

The contact exercise is continuously extended so that the dog must also learn to follow the owner while it is in contact with the owner. This is learned by the fact that when the dog gives the owner contact, you start walking backwards while you reward the dog for the contact. Feel free to reward the dog for continuing to follow the owner while they are in contact.

Self control

The self-control exercise involves teaching your dog that it is okay for a lot to happen around it, but that it does not have to participate.
Here you start out by setting up scenarios that you can manage at home in reversed surroundings. Get your neighbor/husband/wife/friend to help you, this person should be the distracting element. Here you have to reward your dog every time it looks at the disturbance, but it chooses not to seek it out.
Here, distance is a very important element in the training. Start with easy disturbances and with a good distance, then you can increase the difficulty of the disturbance or decrease the distance.

If the dog cannot relate to the world around it with peace of mind or give its owner contact in different environments, we also cannot count on it being able to follow us when we go. Therefore, we must train contact and self-control alongside learning how to walk nicely on a leash.

Remember

Let the dog be a dog and then train: By that I mean, don't train as the first thing when you come out the front door, Especially with puppies and young dogs. Scenario: It could be that the dog has been alone for 6 hours and now needs to pee. It has also probably just woken up from a nap and is full of energy. Therefore, put a long line in the harness and let the dog loose for the first 10 minutes of the trip. After this, there is a greater probability that the dog will be able to understand how to cooperate with you, as its stress level has decreased a little.

Be consistent in training: Here I simply mean that you must be consistent, the dog must know exactly where the boundary is and the boundary must be in the same place every time.

It takes time: It takes time to train a dog, so always set aside plenty of time for the training, don't think that the dog can learn to walk nicely on a leash in a week, because that is not realistic. Training also takes time, if you decide that you are now training to walk nicely from the park and home, then it may well be that the trip takes 5 minutes normally, but 20 minutes during a training session. So make sure you have time.

Walk nicely in leash exercise

When the dog makes a mistake and pulls out: When the dog then pulls the buckles towards something, what do you do?

Here you must:

1. Stop, that way the dog does not reach what it is attracted to by pulling you along.

2. Go down the line and in front of the dog, you shorten the line by the owner moving towards the dog. The owner then walks in front of the dog to re-establish contact. Reward when the dog looks back up at the owner

3. Start walking backwards away from the disturbance while dog and owner have contact.

4. Continue the training when the dog has become comfortable far away from what disturbed it.

- I hope you found this article interesting. It is written by dog ​​trainer Rikke Roed. Did you get something out of the reading and do you, for example, have problems with the dog not walking so nicely on a leash and would you like a course? Contact Rikke Roed at: Rikke.roed@live.dk