Dog Behaviour Advice - Dog Advice Articles
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Teaching your dog to pull on the Lead
There are occasions when we need dogs to pull the handler. For instance, like when tracking or pulling a sledge. Choosing the title of this article is not me being sarcastic. We all know most people actually want to stop their dogs pulling. In training classes many people are not happy being told that the reason that their dogs are pulling them is because that is how they have trained them. Of course they have not done this consciously but because they hold established ideas of what they should do when training their puppy. Sadly, Barbara Woodhouse put dog-training back decades especially for men. Her promoting of enforcement training methods on the television brought the wrong message to the viewing public.
York City Police dog handlers would always try to get to the canteen at Fulford to just to watch her Television programme with laughter and derision. The programmes were leaving the public believing that this was the only correct way of training. This is at a time when reward training was becoming increasingly more popular and an improvement over previously established methods. Unfortunately, Barbra was very persuasive with the Television producers of how good she thought she was. Yes, she was good with horses but with dogs, there were always criticisms of her methods and presentation.
It took a while before handlers as well as trainers began to notice changes in who were attending dog-training classes. By the time they realised the change, it was too late. The fall out of her programmes was fewer people were attending training classes. This was because they were expecting all trainers to be like Barbara. In addition, most men objected to the way she derided them on her programmes and the number of male handlers dropped dramatically. Also watching such enforcement techniques put many people off training. They naturally had no wish to use such a harsh and painful method and certainly not on a puppy.
One other problem was that dog-training classes using such methods do not take dogs for training until they were at least six months old. This had the problem that between 12 and 26 weeks, when the puppies learn at their fastest rate, they have learnt all the wrong things because owners were not wishing to check them the Barbra Woodhouse way. In doing so, they effectively taught their dogs to pull them. Owners would also assume that when the puppy reached six months, if they had not cured the problem, then a dog school would.
If you look around do you see anyone helping owners to teach twelve-week-old puppies how to walk by their side without pulling? There are puppy classes, but these are more for dog and human sociability. Heelwork is never part of the class, yet it should be.
At eight to twelve weeks, most puppies will stay by your side without a lead. After twelve weeks, they start to move further away from the handler. This is fine in the country but not on the seaside front walks etc. It is here people start to use a lead (leash) as a restraint device. This then restricts a puppy, which previously had freedom of movement, to a much smaller circular area defined by the radius of the lead.
One other natural problem is that for both humans and animals, if physically pushed or pulled they react with an equally apposing force in order to retain their equilibrium. This reaction means that when they have a dog pulling them, the owners pull in the opposite direction with an equal amount of force. This creates a standoff, which as the weeks go by, becomes a normal method of walking for both the handler and their dog.
For me the more I competed in Working Trials and learned more and more about reward training the more I began to understand that the lead was not a training aid at all. Teaching my last dog to walk to heal I never used a lead.
There should be no difference to a dog walking by your side on or off the lead. When on the lead, it should remain slack most of the time. This way it becomes only a safety aid and in certain areas a legal necessity. As you walk down a street, your dog will remain by your side just as if there were no lead, even though you are holding the end in your hand whilst the other is connected to the dog’s collar.
A further problem is that most owners starting training lack the skills necessary to train a dog because initially they do not have the physical coordination. This means their puppy or young dog does not understand what their owner is doing and often they need to learn to keep clear of the owner’s feet and legs.
Once the puppy reaches six months of age then it and the handler will have now had fourteen weeks of established pulling on the lead. When they begin dog-training classes, the instructor then has to rectify all this incorrect training of both the handler and their dog.
This then brings us to a further problem of area training. A dog will learn that in the training area it must learn to walk to heel but only until the class is finished. Once outside this area the handler and dog relax reverting to allowing the dog to pull again. This then creates dogs that will only work correctly whilst they are in class. Owners must practice the training everywhere otherwise the trainer is fighting an almost loosing battle.
To avoid such problems all you need to do is to teach your puppy from twelve weeks to walk by your side without a lead when you say Heel. As a puppy, they learn quickly and if you offer encouragement like titbits and plenty of praise, they soon get use to the idea. Start by using initially short bursts of distraction free heelwork and then finish. This way they will quickly understand what the HEEL command means. After that, you can gradually increase the distance and time, along with an increase in the level of distractions.
As you begin to walk your puppy in areas of distractions, the use of a retractable lead allows your puppy to move away from you more than before. Resist the temptation of pulling your puppy back to you; instead encourage your puppy to return by persuasion along with using your command of HEEL. As you see your puppy moving away from you but before it reaches the limit of the retractable give your command HEEL with lots of encouragement. This way your puppy will not learn the lead has a limit or used to pull it back towards you.
For most puppies at this age when they see something that they are uncertain of, they will naturally return to your side for safety. Try to spot these times so that you can predict when your puppy will return to you of its own choice. Doing this you can give your command in advance which will teach your puppy the meaning of HEEL.
I hope that from this article you can understand the way we can inadvertently teach dogs to pull us. If you can recognise the problem, you then can counter this with your HEEL command and use of encouragement, instead of resorting to using the lead.