In order to understand how to stop your dog from pulling on a lead, you need to first understand why your dog is pulling on the lead.
In short, your dog pulls on a lead because you have allowed it to happen. Dogs will pull on the lead to get to other dogs, to other people, to interesting things lying around on the ground, and once your dog gets to its chosen target, its rewarded, so inadvertently we have trained in a bad behaviour at a very early age, and fail to correct it. Then when our little puppy becomes a strong 2+ year old dog, we think we had better do something about it!
First nights in puppy classes, with our new furry K9 friends, we follow our dog into the training room, and then allow it to simply tow us around the area visiting (to the dog all sorts of exciting things and smells).
That very first time we put the lead on our pup, we allowed it to pull away from us, rather than trying to maintain a loose lead and allow them to simply drag it around with them. We turned a simple thing into a battle.
We are also hoodwinked into believing that putting our dogs on a harness, will some how stop them from pulling, just like it does (not) with those sledge pulling dogs. In fact by putting some harnesses on, it makes it incredibly comfortable to pull harder on that lead.
When your dog is on the lead, it should be loose, no tension and making walking your dog a joy, not a chore.
Unless we show our dogs the error of our ways, and start facing up to the fact that we are responsible for the large proportion of problems we have with our dogs, then we are never going to make the right steps to putting things right.
The above picture shows a former puller calmly walking by the owner within our training class.
If you would like to get your dog to stop pulling on the lead, call Steve now on 07795 466007 or email steve@brecklanddogtraining.co.uk to book a private 121 lesson.
