Good Morning All, I have decided to name my boy's walking manners as the "S" walk. haha He is 6 months now, and he was doing fairly well with lead walking over the past month. Until one day, everything was forgotten once again. He now walks in "S" shapes, pretty much everywhere. Pulling is minimal, but when he decides to stop and sniff, there is no way getting him back on track. I have tried every single technique possible, using rewards, choke collars (which i didnt like at all), slip leads (again didnt like it). He is now getting a lot stronger and NOTHING seems to be working. I can no longer even get a fraction of a second of his attention, not even with rewards. Any ideas on way to regain control? Thanks
I'm trying to remember where I heard it but my understanding is that dogs noses really start to work around 6 months. My friend with a 6 month old pip is getting dragged around too if it's any consolation. You need to be patient and persistent. Choose a good reward based method of training and train the lowest distraction area you can find. I walked around in the middle of the road for weeks! There have been a few threads on lead walking recently, have a dig around on the training board
Teach him a 'command' to sniff and then let him do that, then with luck he will know that at heel is where he has to be and as a reward you can tell him 'go sniff'.
Choose your place to walk - it can be anywhere, but somewhere that he will sniff and do what you say. Try not to make it the very most exciting place, somewhere that he will be tempted to do this, but not somewhere that's madly OTT exciting. This could be the street outside your house, the park, a carpark or wherever. Choose a bit of ground to walk in a circle or oblong about 25m. Have super tasty treats and a clicker with you. Start walking, walk and walk and walk - but only around that same circle. Don't walk on new ground, only that circle. At first, he'll have his head down, sniffing. But soon, that bit of ground will be 'sniffed out' because you've walked over it 10, 20 times. When he stops sniffing, and is walking how you want (straight, head up, looking ahead for example) start clicking and treating that position. You need to repeat this in loads and loads and loads of different places. I progressed to making the circle a bit bigger, and taking in a new bush etc. but you need to see what works for your dog. Best of luck with it
LOL, try intiating the "S" yourself. Constantly changing the direction YOU are going, BEFORE he pulls or starts to sniff is a technique you can try. Most of them just want to go for a walk with you and if you keep them guessing as to which direction that will be they tend to focus more on you. To vary it a bit a trick we learned was to mentally mark out a square on the ground and hit the corners by changing direction, cutting kitty corner, doing about turns and reverse about turns. This was to get heeling for obedience work. It really is the same thing as the first paragraph. The trick with this one is to try to NOT make a pattern of your moves, harder to do than you'd think.
