Category: Optimized Walking

I’ve utilized three methods for dealing with Ellie when she refuses to stop pulling on the leash during walks:

1. Some success: keep the leash shorter than normal and require your dog to sit every time they pull. Do this continually until improvement and then slowly lengthen the leash. I would avoid giving treats after they sit so they don’t accidentally equate pulling to sitting + treat = good.
2. More success: stop walking and wait for your dog to give up trying to move forward. Shorten the leash any time they move closer. Use boredom to regain their attention and require them to do something obedient like sit next to you. Require eye contact before moving forward again.
3. Most successful: stop walking as soon as they pull and use a “back” command to turn and reverse direction. I’ve noticed consistently that Ellie walks more politely in a sudden reverse of direction. She wants to go the other way and so she doesn’t pull in the new direction. We do this back and forth until she’s thoroughly confused about where we’re going and then tends to walk more politely.

I am successfully walking Ellie at 8 months without a harness or a gentle lead by doing a few key things. The first is that I basically just focus on her. When I work with Ellie I get intensely focused and basically ignore other people and dogs. Sometimes I imagine it must seem rude because I don’t say hi and I barely interact with them (even if they’re interacting with me) because Ellie gets my attention. Without being distracted, I can notice and correct behavior much more easily than worrying about being polite to a stranger I will most likely never see again. The second thing is that I heavily focus on eye contact for our walks and spend the vast majority of time looking down at her waiting for the next successful glance. When it happens I say, “Ellie 1 good,” which indicates I want her to look at me when I say Ellie, I count 1 which indicates where she’s at the in the process towards receiving a treat, and “good” so she knows I am happy with her. At the count of 3 I take a treat from the pouch so she know she’s making progress and then give it to her at 5. Eventually I will up this to 5 engaging the treat and 10 giving it to her. When I initially started this process she received a treat at every glance. I also had variations like only giving treats when I said, “Ellie,” instead of counting when she looks at me. I also tried doing it based on the general distance we traveled like counting sidewalk squares or making it to the end of a block. You will need to customize based on your particular dog, but the overall concept seems to work pretty well. I noticed a decrease in the amount of pulling and an increase in overall good behavior by following this process.

When passing dogs or people Ellie will get an excited, intense look in her eyes because she wants to meet them. I try to catch her attention prior to this with a treat and eye contact. This allows us to almost always pass by without jumping, barking, or any other undesirable behavior. Focus on the dog, not the passing people. Maintain eye contact, distract your dog with the treat, and they will learn to pass calmly. If you can’t keep their attention, or they still jump or lunge, try adding “barriers” in front of them. What this means is that at 0 barriers you have a dog with existing momentum walking towards another dog or human. It is 1 small step away from increasing that momentum and misbehaving. By stopping ahead of time and having your dog sit, you’ve added 1 barrier to the mix. Now they need to stand and regain momentum from rest to misbehave. You can add another barrier by having them lay down which requires even more energy to misbehave or you can move out of the way and sit on the side with additional space between you and the passing party. With enough distance, the space alone becomes a barrier to interaction.

I use the “roam” command either as a command or if she deviates on her own. Any time we leave the sidewalk or path I say “roam” to indicate that this change in direction/environment/etc. is different. I think it also reinforces her understanding of the roam command overall so she realizes it’s a reward. She doesn’t get treats during roam, but I do treat the experience as a reward itself.

If she consistently starts pulling because there’s a dog in front of us, or the park is coming up, or there’s a squirrel nearby I cease moving in that direction, turn us around, and say, “start over.” We walk roughly 20-30 feet back, turn, and try again. If this continue to fail, which it sometimes does, I turn us around and we go in an entirely new direction. This happened recently when heading to Petco. She knew where we were going and I looped multiple times back and forth, trying to regain control and stop her from pulling until I finally decided to completely change direction. We walked significantly further than we needed to, but she was far more well-behaved when we arrived. Which is a win in my book.

Lastly, I pretend she’s off-leash so as to never fully rely on the leash as my control mechanism. Instead I use commands while the leash is loose, I compromise with her, sometimes I lose the battle of gaining her attention or stopping her from eating something, but it enhances the training experience by forcing me to find things that work. Once you start relying solely on the leash to control your dog you’ve lost a significant battle.

The intricacies and ever-evolving strategies of walking a puppy

When I first got Ellie my focus for walks was on tiring her out. It worked well because she was little and needed lots of rest, but after the first few months she grew more energetic. The idea of wearing her out from a walk no long worked and I realized my focus on that aspect was taking away from actual training and so I adjusted.

I also realized that just because we went outside to “take a walk,” doesn’t mean I need to actually bring her anywhere. Instead I started to focus on walking her around the building I live in. Nothing more than loops around the parking lot and neighboring sidewalks. This kept training fresh in my mind and allowed us to repetitively train different elements over and over instead of facing distractions at the park.

But our walking experiences were still combative. She would pull, fight against her harness, get overly excited to meet other dogs, or simply want to sniff every inch of grass. As a result, I began to be more forceful about our walks. They needed to be strict and the pendulum swung in the other direction. Those walks were equally frustrating because neither of us enjoyed it.

If she became too interested in an area I would avoid it. If she really wanted to sniff somewhere it was suddenly off-limits. I still feel this may be a valid strategy to some degree because it forces attention and removes distractions, but it also just seems mean. She’s young and curious, the world is a fascinating place full of interesting smells, I don’t want to be the thing that stops her from experiencing it.

My expectations were wildly optimistic as well, due mostly to the fact that Ellie started out so strong. She’s intelligent, submissive, and excelled at commands within weeks of getting her. But as time moved on she grew increasingly independent and I didn’t adjust my expectations to match this new challenge. As a result, I grew increasingly frustrated with her performance.

Eventually this led me to reassess the situation entirely because something clearly wasn’t working. I implemented a compromise between strict walks and total freedom. If she requested to explore a patch of grass during our walk, she was required to make eye contact, sit, and sometimes perform additional commands before I issued a “roam” command to her. Upon “roam”, I would loosen the leash and wave my hand to indicate she is free to explore. This method has worked fairly well and I continue to use it today with some improvements that I will mention in a future video.

However, I noticed that if she roams too frequently the rest of the walk can become increasingly dysfunctional. This runs contrary to my starting hypothesis in which I thought that lots of early free roam would “get it out of her system”. This has not been the case. You need to strike a continual balance between obedience and freedom.

Overall I’ve found that setting boundaries and defining the walking experience has been most optimal. I try to let her roam frequently, but not too frequently. I deny some of her requests, but I do not forcibly pull her away. Instead I keep the leash taut until she realizes she can’t win. Then I reward her when she comes back to me and we continue our walk peacefully. This middle-ground of free roam and boundaries and patience on my part has worked wonderfully in the past few months.

I also believe the success of this new method was primarily due to a change in how I approached walks. As I mentioned earlier I thought of walks as a chance for Ellie to get fresh air, exercise, socialize, and explore. It’s what I envisioned a good owner would do with their new puppy. I wanted walks to be her time considering how infrequently a dog gets to “make decisions” and feel free. But this wasn’t the case for us. That freedom at this young age simply spiraled into a dog that wanted to misbehave more. Our walks have significantly improved with discipline and more importantly once I started to treat them all as a training exercise.