Hi, I wonder if anyone out there can help with a problem. My lab is 14 months old now and generally quite a good boy BUT in the last 2 weeks when out walking on a lead he has suddenly taken to lunging at anything that takes his fancy at the side of the road and I mean he does this 10 times in a 100yrd stretch! This is only just started and it is dangerous as he pulls himself and my wife into the busy road. I don't know why he has started doing it or how to stop it! Things he lunges at include bits of mud, paper the odd bottle anything in fact!
Coco is rather like this - though he's getting better. I am on high alert for ANYTHING that might get his attention - paper bags, clumps of mud, squashed road-kill etc. so I am usually prepared to brace myself and try a "leave" or let him inspect something whilst under control. For me, it's about being able to anticipate his reaction before he reacts.
Young male Labradors are strong. Girls are too, but generally not as strong. That lunging thing takes you off balance and time to time the dog gets what he wants. I think this trains them they just have to try to lunge harder! The really strong lunges pull you off balance and the dog gets what he wants. With Charlie, who is a super strong boy, I spent months walking down the middle of roads, staying far enough away from things he would lunge to and moving slowly nearer over time. You can also use 'set ups' that really worked with Charlie. I'd walk round bowls of food and so on in the garden. I have even been known to put bowls of food out down the street - although that's a bit dodgy in terms of other dogs coming along and eating the food!
From my extensive study of two dogs, my boy is also far more interested in smells than my girl and so more likely to lunge towards them. It's tough to work with, since we humans generally have no warning of the smells. In the past, I've just learnt where the regular points on our walks are where the corners or posts etc are particularly smelly, and then I go "on duty" to get Shadow past them without pulling. I found this a fine technique in as far as it went, but it didn't generalise. I've had more success in the couple of weeks since I've been in the UK. The place I walk the dogs each day is a collection of big grassy fields. The grass is generally short, but has lots of slightly taller clumps of longer grass. These are always full of smells, so I have a good visual warning that he's going to want to get to it. It's really handy, because I can then work on his heel from a distance he can manage, walk around it with him on the outside, gradually working closer and with him to the inside and once in a while send him to "go sniff" as his reward for walking nicely. Because there are so many of these clumps, I have loads of training opportunities in each walk and I can see them, clear as day. It's basically the set-ups that Julie describes, except they happen to be naturally occurring. My husband is here for a few days with me, and commented today on the change in Shadow since we were last all here together in mid November, when Shadow was completely incapable of focussing on me. Daily work seems like slow going, and the progress is slow, but when you can look back a few weeks, you can really see changes being made.
Oh yes, that lunge landed me on my backside twice last year. One of the times I was about 30 weeks pregnant and had left my phone in my back pocket. I ended up with a huge rectangular bruise on my backside One of my friends walks her three huskies together on lead. I told her she's crazy and asked how she manges to stay standing. She said that huskies can pull but, if if he do, it's a long, constant (strong) pull that you can brace against where as the Labrador-Lunge (as she named it) catches you off guard and sends you flying! The main thing that helped with me was to watch Ella's body language really closely and learn to spot when she might lunge. As soon as I saw the look (we call it the giraffe neck - when her neck looks really long and her ears are kind of excited looking) I'd capture her focus and throw in a few cues until we were back on track.
