One of the hardest skills for a dog to learn, and one of the most common requests I get, is leash manners. People often feel really frustrated or even embarrassed by their dog’s struggle to get the concept down. But honestly? It’s one of the hardest things to teach, and for a lot of good reasons.
Reason 1: Outside is pretty frickin’ cool.
Next time you go outside, humor me and try something. Close your eyes. What all can you hear? Traffic, kids running up the street, birds peeping or flapping, an engine turning over, a lawn mower… What can you smell? The neighbor’s cooking, the exhaust of a car going by, fresh asphalt, wet leaves…
Outside has a lot of stuff happening, right?
Now, let’s get in your dog’s head. Imagine that you can hear and smell all of that, but add the bugs in the grass, the traces of whatever walked through your yard last night, the sound of trees creaking quietly, the smell of a candy wrapper slowly disintegrating in the gutter… Everything you smell and hear, your dog smells and hears far, far more. It’s kind of a lot.
Reason 2: Leash walking is just too vague a concept.
When we’re teaching sit, the dog sits and gets rewarded. When we’re teaching recall, the dog comes back and is rewarded. In nearly every other training cue, there’s an endpoint, the point where the cue is finished and the dog did what they were asked. That doesn’t exist in leash walking, not on its own. We have to add them in, and that starts with making walking a smaller concept.
How? First, ditch the equipment. Yes, even the leash. Just start inside, you and your dog, practicing going to a heel and staying there. Once that’s down, start walking SLOWLY around the room together. The biggest mistake I see people make here is immediately bolting forward, thinking their dog will bolt and they need to get ahead, or letting their dog set the pace and fighting to keep up. YOU set the pace, not your dog, and that pace needs to be slow as turtles at first, to teach your dog that normal and proper walking is not, in fact, bolting ahead or racing around the room. If you can’t set that rule inside, how can you possibly ask your dog to follow it outside? You are the adult, here, and you need to be the one setting (AND maintaining!) the rules.
As you and your dog start walking together, show them what the rules are, and reward them for hitting the target. While you two walk, give tons of verbal praise and randomly add in a food reward, if you can. A rule I always use is if the dog looks up at me, I give them a verbal mark (“yes!”) in my “praise voice” and try to keep their attention. I have to be more interesting than what’s around them, or they’re going to just go see what else is in the area. If all you can take is five steps at first, that’s fine! That’s five steps more heeling than you did yesterday, more than your dog may have ever done consecutively in their life! That’s cause to celebrate, isn’t it?
Every time you give that praise, you’re adding an endpoint, a step where the action you’ve asked for has been done. With sit, it’s when the dog’s butt hits the floor. With walking, it’s when they’ve taken another three, or five, or ten steps while staying at your side. It’s when they focus just because you’re there and they’re trying to stay engaged with you. It’s when they make the choice to ignore a squirrel and when they sit politely at a curb. Create endpoints where previously, there was no expectation, and you’ll start seeing your dog randomly offer you these behaviors, looking for another endpoint. It’s magic when you see it, I promise.
Start tiny, and build up. This process requires, almost literally, baby steps. Before you can go out on the street, where can you practice that’s still controlled, but opens up the arena a little? Can you practice in your yard or alley? Can you go up and down your driveway? When you’ve graduated from that, walk a few houses down and come back home. Keep it short, keep it simple.
Second, stop fixating on the idea that your dog needs a walk every day or you’re a bad owner. Want to know a secret? I rarely walk my dogs. They have a huge yard, and tons of mental stimulation from their training and respective jobs. Instead of going out and continuing normalizing pulling, focus on teaching your dog what walking really looks like; they’re going to get far, far more out of the mental stimulation of learning than being overstimulated and choking on a collar outside could ever provide them.
Now, let’s talk about that gear. Let’s get one thing clear right away: there is NO training tool on the market that will do this training for you. You need to teach your dog how to walk properly, the equipment you use just helps or hurts that process. Got it? Cool.
So gear. Are you using a “no-pull harness”? Bad news, my friend, but you got ripped off, because no harness, a tool that was designed to help dogs pull heavy loads of cargo, is going to stop your dog from pulling. In fact, that front-connection harness could be doing serious damage to your dog’s joints. “No-pull” harnesses purport to work by pulling your dog sideways or off-balance, so they’re less likely to want to pull. Problem is, frankly, dogs don’t care. They’re going to keep pulling, just sideways and off-balance. They (usually) have four feet, their momentum isn’t especially affected by this action. The real problem with these harnesses, aside from being useless, is that they damage your dog’s shoulder joints over time in two ways: the first is the cinching of these harness that crushes the shoulder and chest, and the second is by shortening their stride so they’re not walking naturally. Dr. Chris Zink has done amazing research in this field; have a look at more info here. I’m not a harness hater, but they’re not a training tool and they’re certainly not helpful for trying to teach a dog not to pull.
Alright, you’re not using that. What about a head collar? Again, nope, that’s not gonna do it. Head collars are a uniquely terrible idea for pullers, due to the compression they put on the neck vertebrae every time the dog pulls. They’re also just really uncomfortable; very few dogs accept them, most will dedicate their time to clawing at their face to get it off, which has led to more eye injuries than I’d care to mention. There was also a case some years ago of a dog who was severely injured by a head collar; the dog jumped up to greet someone, and when the owner pulled back on the leash to try to regain control, the combined force of the dog pulling forward and the owner pulling backward… Suffice to say, it did not end well for the dog.
Flat collars, then? Absolutely not. Flat collars are easy for a dog to slip, and because they don’t cinch and release, are constant, crushing pressure on your dog’s neck when they’re pulling. Flat collars are for holding your dog’s ID tag, and looking cool. That’s it. Martingale? Yeah, same thing. Looks nice, isn’t a training tool.
We’re running out of options, here, aren’t we? This leaves us corrective collars: prong collars and slip chains. Slip chains aren’t a good choice for pullers, either, as they have no safety to prevent cinching too tightly. But! In most cases, a properly fitted prong collar is the best option. There are a lot of good reasons why we’ve been using them for as long as we have. Despite looking like a Medieval torture device, a prong collar is the safest and most gentle way to help your dog understand the most critically important part of leash manners:
The leash pressure concept. The leash pressure concept tells your dog “loose collar = walk”, and in turn, “collar pressure = stop”. This is the key, the most important skill in leash manners. Prong collars work by applying gentle, even pressure around your dog’s neck when they pull, and releasing that pressure when they stop pulling. Easy, right?
Only if you’re supporting that concept, 100% of the time. I cannot begin to count the number of people who have ignored me when I’ve said “a small pull now is a bigger pull tomorrow” and let their dog pull “just a little” because they’re tired and don’t feel like staying consistent. But being lazy now means much, much bigger problems later; once you teach your dog that they’re allowed to pull on the prong collar, they’re going to keep doing it. Despite what the “force-free” crowd likes to parrot, prong collars don’t hurt. If they did, I wouldn’t use them. It’s really that simple. This conversation is giving me terrible flashbacks to the client who told me that their kids thought it was great fun to let the dog pull them on a skateboard by the prong collar, let’s move on. So if your dog has learned that surging into their prong collar gets them where they want to go, then hey, that’s what they’re going to do. It’s on YOU as the adult to make sure that you’re maintaining that leash pressure concept.
Okay, but why not use that same concept with a harness? Well, you can, and in toy breeds, it’s usually the only option. Micro prongs do exist, but toy breeds are very, very prone to tracheal collapse, so I strongly prefer not to use them on toy breeds whenever possible. But that harness must be a properly fitted, non-restrictive harness, and you MUST start from the very beginning. Just like with a prong collar, once a dog has normalized pulling on their harness, it is very, very difficult to undo, and can take weeks, months, or even years to fully eliminate the urge to pull against any tool once that behavior has been rewarded, even a few times.
One last point on your equipment: the leash you’re using matters just as much, and can be a big part of the problem. While they’ve (finally) largely fallen out of use, retractable leashes are straight up trash and should be avoided. Due to the retracting mechanism, these things are always pulling back on your dog, causing two near-impossible to correct issues. The first is the normalization of pressure while walking. By teaching your dog that pressure is normal and good and how we walk, you’re literally encouraging your dog to yank as hard as they can to get the most leash they can. The second is it encourages your dog to wander off and do whatever they want, reinforcing that ignoring you is fun and great. The same is true of bungee leashes. Do yourself a favor and get a real leash, 4-6′ in length, that doesn’t get longer because your dog pulled.
Final summation: Big ideas like heel walking need frequent markers and the right equipment, and people frequently are missing one or both. A leash should be a safety belt, there in case you need it, and not a steering wheel, where you have no control without it. Securing the right equipment for the job and cultivating a calm, relaxed walking habit through consistency builds the happiest, safest walks for both ends of the leash!