My labrador is a great dog, he's friendly and goofy and is always excited to see me when I finish work. There's just one problem and it appears never-ending. He pulls on the lead, a lot. I've tried all sorts of tips. I change direction unexpectedly. I stop moving when he reaches the limit of his lead and get him to come back to me before we move off. When he comes back or does actually walk nicely I praise him and give him a treat so that being next to me is a great place to be. I do little bits of training and play little games so that I'm interesting to him. We have done some heel training and he's not bad at it. But when we're on a walk he just has to be at the very limit of his lead. He's not dragging me along but I'm sure he would if I let him! He's quite happy to come back to my side when I say 'Here." But when he's come back to my side and I've praised him and given him his treat he shoots back to the end of his lead in a huge hurry. Sometimes we're stopping every few metres. He is often better in the last 10 - 15 minutes of his walk. He usually trots along quite happily beside me then (although not always). He's 14 months old and when I speak to people about this they go "He's just a baby! He'll grow out of it!" But I've seen much younger dogs than him walking well and ignoring other dogs (which he definitely doesn't do!) I'm particularly concerned because when I'm at work my mum walks him and she's in her 70's and is starting to struggle with him as he becomes more powerful. I keep waiting for our perseverence to pay off but he's not improving at all. What am I doing wrong!?
Hi there, I'm afraid this is not something that dogs grow out of. You'll need to train your dog not to do it. It can be a very challenging thing too overcome, but it IS possible By allowing him to move forward when he does this, you are reinforcing the pulling I'm afraid I published some information on this topic last week: When Your Dog Will Not Stop Pulling On The Leash Have a look at that, and let us know if you have any questions
"By allowing him to move forward when he does this, you are reinforcing the pulling I'm afraid." Sorry, I might not have expressed myself very well there. When he's at the limit of his lead we don't move forward. He has to come back to me before we set off again. That's why I don't understand why he keeps doing it. As far as I can tell, he doesn't get anything out of being there. I will read the article tonight and see if I can work out what I need to do differently. If anyone's had the same problem and managed to turn things around, I'd love to hear how you did it!
All Digs do this at some point and you need to train as Pippa suggested. try changing the environment and level of distraction. Start inside you house and walk the dog on leash. Click and reward when dog is where you want it. If that works well after several session go to driveway and so on. Perhaps work on heeling in parallel. Soon dog will understand what you are after. if you only work directly on your walk you are competing with a lot of interesting smells and distractions. So therefore you need to help the dog by removing them. Good luck
Hi @SueH I’m with you... We are at 8 months with our pup, he walked beautifully at heel from the second we took him out until about 4 1/2 months old and then he began his campaign of pulling and lunging. After various methods and some support from a dog trainer we have started to break the back of it but with any distraction he’s back to lunging. He is 25kg now, so as you can expect, it’s painful. We used a technique called ‘magic hand’ via an Absolute Dogs trainer plus other things like VERY short training sessions and we didn’t walk unless we were lead training, as well as changing direction when a lunge happens, waiting for him to return to outside before we go forward, focus games, high value treats etc. Very similar to your methods too. However... we’ve been working on this for months without fully cracking it. I know we’ve made progress but I wonder if anyone else has any idea how long it can take (as an average) to get it someway reliably trained? It’s hard to tell whether you’re still making a positive difference and progressing the training or if you’re undoing your hard work.
SueH, tire him out a little before a walk with a strenuous fetch ball game or other exercise. Takes the edge off. I found this video which I found super helpful for us. Watch the whole thing, the beginning is a tad off putting. My Cooper is 14 months old. Also I found it works better to keep a short leash when you are ready to start walking in a straight line, regular walk after practicing the video technique a while. Enough to sniff the ground and enough so it's slack, not enough to get much ahead of the heel position. My theory about why this works is when he's out front he feels he's free to do what he wants. I used to use a lot more 'look at me's' then a treat to help keep him in place but I have gradually weened those out and I don’t really treat for 'just' heeling anymore (except for off leash!). Now he gets treated for any person he passes. Or cats, chickens etc. At short intervals en route where I know he likes to smell I will say, 'go sniff' and let him have a longer leash. Then it's back to short lead before we move on again. If during sniffing he pulls I just don’t move until he looks at me or comes back to me. Then I let him move forward to sniff again. The first ten minutes of a walk I try to not insist on anything too strict, lots of sniffing, long leash. But at the same time no pulling. If he pulls at heel I reverse direction but not as a surprise move, I think of it more as a 'reset', we just turn around and head back to where we came from until he is walking nicely then we turn back around and carry on, no dramas. I vary the distance of how far back, typically a few metres but whatever I feel it takes. Repeat as required. Try to reverse course BEFORE he gets to the point where he's pulling. You get a feel for when he's getting out of position. That's when you turn to 'reset' him. Before we got to that point of walking in a straight line for any distance I'd often do squares instead of reverses. I'm sure the neighbours thought I was crazy. You have to forget about destination for a while. We're chugging along pretty good these days at heel but we still have issues we're working on. He has a lot of problems passing people on the street who show interest in him. He hasn’t yet learned to reliably not jump on someone to 'say hello'. He's hopeless when he sees other dogs (frustrated greeter). To combat the latter we're having regular training sessions in a park with his brother and his owners who have the same problem. We have been gradually been walking them closer and closer together. We need to figure out some next steps soon as we're pretty close together now and this also does not generalise to other dogs (and we have a lack of opportunity to practice on other dogs) I hope sharing our experiences help with yours. I think I am just going to persevere through this teenager stage and keep working at it.
It takes work and consistency. For Sam I had to reverse direction with him every time he pulled ahead of me. Some walls we took we never left the driveway. As we walked toward the street if he pulled I reversed direction towards the house, then if he pulled I’d reverse direction towards the road. I don’t tell him “no” when he pulls but I do praise him when he follows after a direction change. It’s taken months but he’s getting better.
An update: Cooper has just turned 16 months. Cooper is doing great walking past people now (on the sidewalk), is heeling well and walking on a loose leash well. He is much better at not jumping on people to say hello but not perfect especially if they fuss too long. He ignores cats, birds and ducks, horses and to a lesser extent sheep and cows because we haven’t practiced those much. We have been working for the past couple plus months primarily on his dog reaction, leash frustration/anxiety barking/lunging which I would class as previously extreme and we are doing a lot better and now. He has three dogs as off leash playmates, 2 of which are on leash walk mates as well, 2 of those started out as his first and second 'set up' dogs when I got serious about changing his behaviour and figured out what it was (never having heard of leash reactivity before). The first set up dog took us a couple months to greet on leash gradually working closer, the second dog took two sessions. Two! Session 1 was half an hour and we didn't make it all the way up to the dog who was sitting across the street, session 2 about 10 minutes. Walked right by her then turned around and walked right up to say hello. Right after which we celebrated with an off leash play session. So I'm updating to give anybody reading hope. Cooper's dog reactivity had gotten so bad he couldn’t see a dog from so far away you could barely tell it was a dog to so improved we accidentally came across a dog the other day at close quarters and he stayed very calm so I let him hang around it, walk away and come back to it and after a while he even laid down and ignored it at then we both got bored and we went home. I am taking no chances though. I plan on keeping my dog reactivity training measures in place for a few more months to counteract all the previously times he practiced the 'bad' behaviours and ideally I'd like to figure out a way to get some more casual, longer distance encounters with new dogs.
