Hi everyone! This video is on proactive training tips for leash walking with your new puppy
or an adult dog. As you can see my puppy is full of beans. She's very active and if i were to just
go out and put a leash on her you would see some really not very wonderful footage
of her pulling on leash. So the way that i train is using positive reinforcement
and the way that you train is you set the dog up for success in small approximations. Now a lot of
times people ask me why are you not showing your dog pulling like a maniac, biting at the leash,
biting at your clothes and the answer is is that when animals rehearse a behavior
no matter what type of training you do, that rehearsal of the behavior is going to make it
more likely to happen in the future than if the animal never did it at all. So with leash walking
with a young puppy or a new adult dog it's going to be very frustrating to be attached to someone
by a leash and if that first experience is out on a walk when they're excited and they're not
wanting to take treats and they pull towards something and they want to get to it and
suddenly they feel that tension on the leash and they're blocked from getting somewhere,
that's going to potentially cause them to pull more or get frustrated turn around and bite the
leash. So if we can train the puppies how to put their harness on, what it feels like to feel that
tension on the leash and what it means to come back to you as well as teach them where to walk
inside your house and in your yard (if they're not distracted out there) first before then
attempting to walk them, it's going to set your training up for success. So i'm going to show you
footage of what my puppy was like the first day i got her and how excitable she can be,
bounding around in an open space and then the first walk that we had together on leash.
You can see she's really calm and confident and understands the concept of walking next to me. Now
if i just put her on the leash you can imagine that she would have just immediately hit the
end of the leash and wondered what was going on. Now i'll show you what we worked on to get here.
The first thing i did was mark and reinforce her for standing at my side and also for
walking at my side like this. So i take a step forward mark and then reinforce.
Because i wanted to walk her with my other dogs i worked on this exercise. If i had just put her on
a leash with my other dogs on a walk she most likely would have pulled towards them tried
to jump on them and play with them while we're walking. By breaking up the steps to be small
and easy where she's first ignoring the other dogs while they're laying still and then moving calmly
together off leash at my home you can see it set her up for success to completely ignore my dogs
on a walk. I also played leash and harness games teaching her to be comfortable having
her harness put on and taken off without biting at it, teaching her to ignore the leash when it
moves around her and teaching her that the pressure on the leash simply means to come
back to me. I put a link to the video tutorial on how to train these in the description below.
If you have a dog or puppy who is already off to a bad start pulling on their leash,
biting at their leash, the wonderful thing is is you can go back and work on those behaviors
in a place that your puppy or dog is comfortable, so inside your living room and that's where
i worked on Epics behaviors right here in this living room where she was comfortable
and found the treats highly reinforcing. The problem with trying to train when out and about
using food is that the dog's motivation is to want to explore usually, unless they're worried
and then if they're worried then they're not feeling hungry either. So the best time to build
positive associations and train new behaviors is in a non-distracting environment, even if it's a
behavior that's something that you're going to be doing outside. So if your dog is struggling
or your dog has a regression and starts pulling on leash or starts biting at the leash you can
work on all those behaviors in brush up sessions inside your house, in your yard and out front
where the dog is interested in what you have as reinforcement. Thank you so much for watching!
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