Don’t expect to get pulled around all day and remain sane. Learning how to walk a dog that pulls is fundamental to any enjoyable dog walk. Both you and the dog will have a delightful time only if you expect the dog that you walk to follow your rules. This is called teaching the dog leash manners.
Yes, indeed, you will need the right type of leash to handle your dog correctly, especially if you have a hard-to-walk puller in your hands. But teaching a dog leash manners is also crucial to curb reactivity, which is what leads not only to a large dog yanking your arm out of your socket but often to that dog getting into trouble with other dogs while on a walk with you.
Obviously, not until you’ve taught a dog not to pull, could you even consider walking more than one using a tangle-free leash, which can be a huge achievement and a source of quite a bit of extra income for you.
How to Walk a Dog That Pulls Without Injuring It
There are techniques that will suffice for some cases and then there are tools that, well applied, will work for the most stubborn cases. The objective of this articles is not to emphasis points of controversy, but to note that there are alternatives to different situations. Dogs like humans have different temperaments, and what works with one won’t necessarily work with another. Just as we recommend in our Training A Dog to Heel article, there is no consensus in the dog training community about what method is most effective. Do what works for you but do no harm.
Whether you use a Halti, a Gentle Leader, a prong collar, a martingale, Freedom Harness or a regular leash is your choice. Just remember that each tool is designed to achieve the same result in differing ways, and not every way makes sense for every dog. Some tools, especially if misapplied, can cause unnecessary discomfort and even harm to a dog, resulting in the very opposite outcome that you aim to achieve. Nevertheless, the following 12 steps should give you a sound method to consider using get just about any dog to stop pulling. You will learn how to walk a dog that pulls under just about any circumstance. So, let’s get going.
The 5 Steps to Walking A Dog That Pulls
1. Get the Dog to Calm Down
An overly excited dog going for a walk on a leash with you is like a 5-year-old grandchild going to the park with his 85-year-old grandparent. There is too much energy waiting to liftoff and you’re just too sluggish to keep up with it. So, the dog pulls! How do you get a child not to run off into the street and get run over by a car? Simple. You get the child to calm down and you never put one foot out the door until the child is settled down are required. You train a dog to understand the same rule.
2. Get the Dog to Become Treat-Motivated
A dog that is too excited won’t respond to treats. Treats are an excellent tool to use for positive reinforcement of behaviors that you wish the dog to adopt through repetition. Once your dog is calm enough to pay attention to you, it’s very valuable to ensure you can get it to become treat-motivated. You do this not by offering the least appealing treat first and then pulling out all the stops for the real goodies, but by doing the reserve. If you feed the dog junk at first and it learns to behave as you wish only when you pull the good stuff out, then the dog has trained you to wait for a response only until you deliver the goods. Find out what your dog is enthusiastic about eating and use that from the very first. Be sure the dog is neither sick nor has come to view a treat as a deception, and use treats when hunger is gnawing at its belly. This is when it’s most effective.
3. Spray Your Leash with Dog Repellent
Although dogs respond better to being shown to do something rather than being made to do something, there are times when you simply need to stop a reactive dog from chewing the leash. You can’t avoid doing this if you want to know how to walk a dog that pulls, because it often happens regardless of how calm a dog may have been before a walk. The moment they get their leash on (or even before that!), some dogs are ready to bite or chew on it. See a typical case in the video below. To solve this situation, spraying the leash with a natural repellent. This can quickly stop this behavior and get the dog ready to step out more readily tether to your hand.
4. Slip On and Tighten The Right Collar Correctly
Regardless of the type of collar that you wish to use on your dog, you must always place it correctly, behind the dog’s ears and tight enough to allow one to two finger to run underneath it. The collar should be snug, not uncomfortably tight. Think of a dog collar as you think of your own wristwatch. You don’t want it to slip out. Consider, nonetheless, that for dogs that have a wider neck than their own heads, such as pugs and bulldogs, a martingale collar or a harness can be a better option. Ensuring the appropriate collar fit for a pulling dog is a critical precaution, as you do not want the dog to slip out of the collar while you’re teaching it not to pull.
5. Start With Minuscule Walks Until The Dog Learns to Heel
Set your objective to take long walks only until the dog is no longer pulling and you’ve taught it to loose leash walk. At first, set your aim for short distances until the dog is behaving exactly as it should. How short a walk? It can be 2 ft down the sidewalk in 10 minutes. The goal here is not the walk itself but how the dog should walk. And this starts by ensuring the dog’s attention is on you and not on the environment around it. Get the dog appropriately to behave first, to realize that the pulling is not what gets the distance. Reward the dog not pulling by giving it distance to travel and explore because you are the one going the distance and exploring first. If the dog pulls, you stop the distance and turn in the opposite direction. Teach the dog to follow you because pulling has taught you to follow the dog.
Now That You’ve Learned How To Walk A Dog That Pulls
If you follow these 5 steps on how to walk a dog that pulls, you will not need to deal with the pulling on your leash for long. Dogs don’t pull out of a desire to lead so much as from a lack of focus on their human companions. The great outdoors is full of movement, fragrances and unexpected sights. Dogs are naturally curious. All this stimulus requires a fast pace that humans cannot keep up with. In this sense, a pair of human legs are just a drag on a dog. The stronger the dog, the more determined it will be to overcome the drag just to get to where it wants to go.
Don’t reinforce this behavior. Make the dog aware of how much more exciting it can be to walk as your companion, by stimulating it to control its impulses repeatedly using rewards, treats and deterrents. But remember that, just as with children, there must be times when you need to let them run free and use all their energy, exerting all their strength in strenuous activities. So, don’t just take them out walking. Teach them to play, especially if you take a working breed outdoors, such as Dobermans, Labradors, German Shepherds, bloodhounds or huskies. These need much exercise and action not to become restless, destructive or depressed.