Welcome back to the multi-part series on training your dog to walk on a loose leash. As mentioned in Part 1, it’s important for you to decide what your training goals are before you start training. In many situations, owners are content to put their dog on special equipment, like a no-pull harness or a head collar to minimize pulling. Some owners would like to be able to walk their dog eventually on a regular collar, without any special equipment. If you fall into the latter category, then read on! Terminology Before training begins, it’s important to review some training terminology. Positive training techniques often rely on the use of a behavior marker. A marker – usually in the form of a sound – identifies for the dog the exact moment that they did something correct, and signifies that some form of reinforcement or reward is forthcoming very soon. This … Read More
Multi-Part Series: Loose Leash Walking – Part 1
In my professional dog training opinion, loose leash walking with your dog is one of the most difficult things you might ever have to teach your dog. If there was one key to training a dog well, it’s consistency, of course. Therefore, if you live with any other people in your home (like most of us do!) and those people aren’t 100% on board with your training, this might be a challenge. Sometimes the even bigger challenge is maintaining consistency with ourselves. Remembering to do the exact same thing over and over and over again can become boring, so we humans like to mix it up sometimes. This may or may not be a good learning technique for certain dogs. Also, as we begin to see success with our dogs, we tend to become more lax in our training criteria and the learning curve in our dogs can begin to … Read More