How do I stop my dog pulling on the leash

Well, the first order of business is to understand WHY your dog is pulling on the leash. And that's because it works.

Leash walking for exercise is a very strange activity - we attach a dog who can cover the same ground that we do five or seven times in the time we take and force them to walk near us without any further instruction as to what the point of the exercise is. Oftentimes, I see people even walking their dogs while looking at their phones - a recipe for imminent disaster if I ever saw one.

Ultimately, directionless and bored, your dog directs their pent up nervousness and athletic ability at training you to be less of a passive hindrance. Their goals are to sniff as many interesting sources of information as they can, to leave some communications for the other dogs in the territory, and to keep themselves safe.

So, in the interest of doing that, they apply negative reinforcement to the human at the other end of the leash. Which means that they pull on the leash - a very unpleasant sensation for the human, bordering on punitive (and plenty of dogs use the leash to actively punish their owners as well).

But surely they can't be deliberately doing this?

Absolutely they can. Dogs are very smart, with cognition approaching that of a three year old child. They understand dog training (and people training) far better than most people do because they do nothing else but think about it. They don't have a phone to get distracted by.

A whole cadre of so called "dog behavior experts" called dogs "lemon brained" back in the 90's and 00's and built their careers on telling people that dogs were too stupid to be responsible for their own actions. They are the same people who said that dogs don't have any sort of social hierarchy - which would make them absolutely unique among all social species in the world. Both of those points are absolute nonsense and served primarily to generate large quantities of money as people are easy to fleece of their funds when they feel guilty.

So, dogs are constantly using negative reinforcement on people.

The dog pulls on the leash.

It isn't fun for the person.

So the person yields into the pressure and voila, they have taught the dog that leash pulling is an effective method for getting around town to get their business done and read all the gossip in the neighborhood.

The correct way to solve this puzzle is to set it on its head - if I want to fix leash pulling, the dog can ONLY access those things it wants when it doesn't pull. In order to teach a dog not to pull, I rely on a series of physics problems I give the dog to solve using the same tool dogs use on us - negative reinforcement. The dogs are typically game for this and pick it up clearly if your technique is clear, and then I make sure to watch them intently enough that I can take the opportunity to reward them for not pulling while I'm walking them by releasing them on command and letting them read their scent gossip and add some to the neighborhood.

But afterward, we return to not pulling.

If you'd like to learn how I do it (there are multiple strategems for achieving this, I use what I think is the most effective but it's quite possible to do it differently) give us a call and I'd be happy to help!

HAPPY HEELING!