Able is now 5 months old. Over the last couple of months, I have put a lot of work into encouraging him to walk on a loose lead. A lot of agility people don’t put much effort into this, but I have set myself a goal – I want Able and I to walk up to the start line together on a loose lead before his first agility run.
I have a few reasons for this:
- I have two off-lead walking areas near my house, and I walk to them several times a week (although mostly with just Rik at the moment). I want to be able to walk both dogs to the park, and to enjoy that experience, because I’ll walk my dogs more often if it’s not a frustrating battle of wills.
- If we find ourselves in another covid lockdown, those local walking spots will be our only options, and I’ll have to walk Able on lead every day. And he’ll probably be more excited than usual since he won’t have other fun outings in his life. Again, I want to be able to enjoy walking him on lead, so that it doesn’t get put in the Too Hard Basket if I’m in a grumpy mood.
- Constantly pulling on the lead is bad for a dog’s neck and trachea, even on a flat collar. Constantly pulling on a front-clip harness pulls the dog’s spine out of alignment. Pulling in a headcollar is not great for the dog’s neck either. I want our walks to be enjoyable for my dog too, without increasing his risk of injury.
- I want to enjoy stress-free warm-ups and cool-downs. Agility dogs should be walked around for several minutes before and after they run. I haven’t consistently done this with either of my last two dogs, because they were/are inclined to pull on lead when they can see agility happening. Again, if walking my dog on lead is unpleasant, I’m going to do it less often.
This is moderately high up in my priority list (if I don’t have a lot of success at some point I’ll drop it so I can put more time into agility training), but I think it’s worth investing the effort while he’s young to try and get nice loose lead walking.
Today I’m going to share some of the things I’ve been doing with Able to help develop this skill. If this isn’t something you care about with your dog, you may not find the rest of this post very interesting – so here’s a picture of a cute puppy before you leave.
Choosing Your Equipment
There are lots of gadgets out there for training a dog to walk on a lead. So far I’m just using a plain collar and lead with Able. I would probably have made faster progress with a headcollar, but I don’t mind spending the time to work on this, and I prefer not to use one because so many dogs seem to inherently dislike them. Here’s my take on the different walking options on the market:
| Plain collar | Pros – Cheap and readily available. Cons – Doesn’t help combat pulling. – Some pressure on the trachea. If your dog pulls on the lead and you don’t mind, consider a rear clip harness instead. |
| Martingale collar/limited slip collar | Pros – Not as bad for the dog’s neck as a choke chain. – Very easy to put on and remove. That’s why they are commonly seen at agility shows. Cons – Quite a lot of pressure on the trachea, if it can close around the dog’s neck tighter than a regular collar would. – Often easy for the dog to escape by pulling backwards out of it, especially if it doesn’t close tighter than a regular collar. – Doesn’t usually help combat pulling. |
| Rear clip harness | Pros – Ergonomically ideal for pulling. If you don’t mind pulling, put your dog in a rear clip harness so that he can pull with less wear and tear on his body. Often used in dog sports such as sledding and tracking where the dog is supposed to pull or maintain pressure on their lead. – The most comfortable option for the dog, assuming it fits well and does not restrict movement. Cons – Ergonomically ideal for pulling. If you put it on a puppy and don’t do any specific training, you are highly likely to finish up with a dog that pulls. |
| Front clip or no-pull harness | Pros – Prevents pulling in some dogs. Cons – Many of these harnesses restrict the range of motion in the shoulder joint, making it hard for the dog to move effectively. If you walk on one often, this will become how your dog always moves. The ones that don’t restrict movement, also aren’t very effective at reducing pulling. – Some dogs will still pull on them, and this is really bad for their shoulders and spine. I was given one to review with my dog Spring, who was a bad puller. She still pulled as bad as ever, except that now her front end was rotated in such a way that her outside front paw couldn’t reach the ground. |
| Headcollar | Pros – Gives the owner a lot more control than any of the other options. For many handlers with big strong dogs, this is the only device they can manage their dogs in. – The only device that gives you control over which direction the head is pointing. Cons – Most dogs just hate them. Even when the owner puts lots of effort (and dog food) into building a positive association with it, I’ll still see the dog trying to wipe it off on the grass or on a stranger’s leg. – It’s going to jerk your dog’s neck around if they hit the end at speed. Never use a headcollar on a long line or a longer-than-average (say 1.2m) lead. |
| Choke chain | Cons – Potentially very damaging for the dog’s trachea. Consider a headcollar instead if you are struggling to control your dog. – A strangulation hazard. Not permitted for use in agility for this reason, and dogs should never be left unsupervised while wearing one. – Extremely cruel when used “correctly”. The correct (and horrific) way to use a choke chain is to jerk back hard on it, so that there’s a sudden strong force on the dog’s throat, and he’s briefly unable to breathe. This freaks the dog out that he becomes more inhibited in his behaviour all round, and if you time the correction right, he’ll learn that it’s safer not to get too far away from you when on lead. Please don’t do this – there are kinder ways to achieve your loose-lead walking goals. – Usually not very effective at reducing pulling if not used “correctly”. A lot of people try to use choke chains as passive pulling-correction devices. If you just let the chain tighten around the dog’s neck gradually as he pulls, most dogs will get used to this sensation and ignore it. I’ve seen so many dogs dragging their owners around with choke chains on, mildly suffocating themselves in the process. It may put an upper limit on the strength of the pulling, but it doesn’t usually stop it entirely. |
Before I leave the subject of equipment I want to bring up flexi leads. Please don’t walk your puppy on one. There are so many reasons not to:
- The ones with rope cords can cause some nasty injuries to exposed human or canine flesh.
- Your puppy can build up a lot of speed if he runs out to the end of the lead, and then he gets a sharp jerk in the neck. Ouch.
- It’s easy to lose control of your puppy – if you’re not quick enough with your thumb, suddenly he’s out in the middle of the road, or greeting a very unfriendly adult dog.
- It will teach your puppy to walk right at the end of the lead, with a slight pressure in it. When he does that, he gets more lead. In other words, it will teach him to pull on the lead – and if you want to use a regular lead later, he’s going to pull on that too.
When I want a longer lead to walk a puppy on, I clip two or three normal-length leads together. I can hold the excess length in loops with one hand, and use the other hand to adjust the length so that it’s slightly loose, but not so loose that the pup gets his feet tangled in it. This is mostly how I walked Able until he was about 14 weeks old.
Purposeful Practice
The key to preventing pulling is never to allow it in the first place, and to make sure that if it does happen it always results in Not-Going-Anywhere. You can’t just set aside a few minutes a week to teach him to walk nicely on lead, and then let him drag you around for half an hour on his walk every day.
When you are going out with your puppy, be honest about what your intentions are for the outing, and choose your gear appropriately:
- If it’s for socialisation, you can carry the puppy for some of the outing. Put him in his headcollar if you’re using one to give you more control around distractions. When he’s exploring things at ground level, follow him around and try to keep the lead loose. If he spies something you don’t want him to explore, try to get him to disengage from it without dragging him away – pick him up, make a funny noise, distract him with a tug toy etc.
- If it’s for HIS exercise or mental enrichment, you can clip two or three leads together to make a longer lead. Hold the end bunched up in one hand, and use the other hand to feed the lead forward and back so it doesn’t go too tight or too loose. Again, keep an eye on him and follow him if he wants to investigate something that’s safe. Until you’ve done some training, choose places where you’ll be away from traffic, and use a collar or back-clip harness. If you’re going somewhere busy with lots of puppy temptations, you might want the extra control of using a headcollar.
- If it’s for YOUR exercise – leave the puppy at home. His growing body won’t be ready for this prolonged exercise like this until he’s a year old, or later even for a large breed dog. You can introduce the bike during the first few months, and teach the pup how to move alongside it nicely while going at a slow pace (pup walking or trotting, not cantering). With an older pup, you’ll want to train a specific type of loose-lead walking for your exercise sessions, where the dog moves forward in a straight line and doesn’t stop to sniff. Using a separate piece of equipment (e.g. a back clip harness v a flat collar) for this type of exercise is one way to help the dog understand when it’s OK to stop and smell the roses, and when it isn’t.
- If it’s to do errands, or anything that requires you to arrive at a specific destination in a timely fashion – leave the puppy at home, or drive. Don’t take your puppy out when you’re in a hurry, because you’ll let your criteria slip and bad habits will develop.
- If it’s to work on loose lead walking – put him on the walking equipment you want to use when he’s an adult dog, and take piles of treats. Start in very low-distraction environments at first – one room of your house, a different room, your garden, the street right outside your house – and then gradually build the duration that you go out for. If you have any kind of time pressure, stay near your house, so that you can pick him up and carry him home if needed. This is a better option than letting him pull you home “just this once” because you don’t have time to stop and wait for the correct behaviour.
You also need to be clear on your criteria. I don’t at all mind if the lead goes tight briefly, but then the dog stops and waits for me. I don’t mind much if there is a light pressure on the lead sometimes, at least not enough to stop and wait every single time that happens. There are two things I really really don’t like – when I see a conscious decision to lean into the lead and pull with the front legs coming off the ground together, and when the lead is tighter than I could hold with 2 fingers but the dog doesn’t immediately come closer to me to release that tension.
We started our on-the-street training at 13 weeks, just walking past the neighbour’s house and back a few times. At 15 weeks we walked all the way round the block for the first time. At 4.5 months we braved the 5-minute walk to our local park for the first time. I brought my other dog along, which was a massive mistake – I should have worked on walking both of them together on shorter outings first. We took a few more walks to the park solo, while I worked on the two-dog walking in separate training sessions.
This week, I walked both dogs to the park again, and things went much more smoothly. He’s no longer constantly bouncing around her and getting her tangled up, and she’s figured out that she can’t abruptly change sides to investigate every interesting smell like she used to. It was still quite a juggling act to manage two dogs and treats and a toy and a bag full of poo, but we’re much closer to what I want.
“Cookie!”, and the Double-Edged Sword of Cues
I’ve been using a marker (a clicker or a verbal “Yes”) for over twenty years now, but I only came across the idea that I could have markers that meant different things last year. Your marker cue can tell your dog what type of reward to expect, and where you’ll deliver it. I learned about this concept at the 2020 Lemonade Conference, but I hadn’t really found a use case to apply it to my training yet.
Well, I figured it out very quickly when I was trying to walk a busy puppy on a loose lead. To encourage my puppy to walk next to me, I needed to feed him next to me – but I just couldn’t get the food into his mouth fast enough before he was headed off in a new direction. I needed a way to reward him in the precise second that he was walking semi-nicely, but also in the ideal location to encourage more of this behaviour – at or slightly behind the seam of my pants.
So I introduced a new marker cue, “Cookie”. “Cookie” means that I have food for him, and he needs to collect it from my hand, just behind my leg on the side that’s closest to him. When I see walking that I like, I say “Cookie” and Able drops back behind my leg to grab his bikkie. At the moment he has an unfortunate habit of shooting forward like a cannonball after he’s taken his bikkie, but it’s still a work in progress.
This training has clarified in my brain that markers and cues are more or less the same thing. Markers are cues, because they tell your dog what behaviour to do in order to get their reward – that whiplash head turn to look at you when you click is a behaviour, just like any other behaviour. And well-known cues trained with positive reinforcement are markers, because they tell your dog that a reward is coming – they just have to do an easy-peasy behaviour first.
This means that my “Cookie” cue/marker is a bit of a double-edged sword. I could use it to get my puppy to stop pulling, by saying “Cookie” when he’s pulling. This would solve my short-term annoyance (the lead would go slack for at least a few seconds while he collected his bikkie), but it would also reinforce the pulling behaviour, so I would see more of it.
So how do I train my puppy not to pull on the lead? I need to think about what good loose-lead walking looks like (I have decided my criteria is “some part of puppy parallel with my leg, while moving at a walk or trot”), watch out for times when my puppy chooses to do this behaviour, and celebrate those good choices.
The Leash Pressure Game
This is idea that I first started playing with by myself. Then this week I saw it in a course I’m taking with Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, about calming down over-the-top greeters (Able is just astonishingly happy to meet every person who crosses his path, a mood that isn’t always reciprocated when he starts peeing himself while leaping six feet in the air).
The goal of the game is to explicitly teach your dog to respond to a tight leash by moving in that direction and creating some slack. You gently apply a small amount of pressure to the lead, wait for the dog to make any movement that releases that pressure, and then reward them with food. At this first layer of the game you should be applying pressure in all directions – forward, backward and to the sides. Once your pup realises there’s cookies involved you might find it quite hard to apply pressure backwards, though, as he won’t want to turn his back on you!
Once your dog understands that it pays to move with the pressure, you can add a medium-level distraction/reward – something that he’ll be interested enough in that he’ll face towards it, but won’t get too frantic about. I used a different food bowl that he hadn’t seen before, with a handful of kibble in it. Place it on the ground in front of him, apply the pressure to the lead, and reward him from your hand when he moves to release the pressure. After a couple of successes, release him so that he can eat/play with the distraction.
The expert level is to walk towards the distraction. Keep the lead fairly short. Stop every time you feel the puppy apply pressure on the lead, and wait for him to release it before you continue. Continuing is his reward, as it is getting him closer to the thing he really wants. You can also apply deliberate pressure from your end of the leash sometimes – again, don’t let him continue forward until he releases it.
Always be gentle with how you apply the pressure. Squeeze on the lead and then pull back very gradually, just until the lead is tight and you’re sure the puppy can feel it. If you have horse-riding experience this might come naturally to you – if not, try tying the lead around one of your wrists and applying pressure with the other hand to get a feel for how to do it smoothly, without any jarring.
I love this game because it takes something that really annoys me – the lead going tight – and turns it into a cue for the dog to do a specific behaviour that will un-annoy me. I still need to do some work with higher-level distractions (especially people) but it’s helped Able to get the basic idea of walking on a lead more quickly. And the first time he went on the wrong side of a lamppost and felt his lead go tight, he knew exactly how to fix it!