Tips to Help a Santa Monica Dog Listen Better on Walks

By: David Codr

Published Date: June 19, 2020

Jax and Leo scaled - Tips to Help a Santa Monica Dog Listen Better on Walks

For this Santa Monica dog behavior session, we share tips to help 4 year-old German Shorthair Pointer / Terrier mix Jax (pictured here with his roommate, puppy Leo) listen on walks.

As Santa Monica’s Dog behavior expert, I have learned that any time a dog does not listen to us human on a walk, the problem usually originates inside of the home. Many people fail to provide the dog with rules or structure and give it virtually everything it wants. When this is the case, the dog has no motivation or practice at listening to the human. Additionally often dog hasnt ben taught / learned to listen to its human on walks. Just like anything else, if you want to do something, you have to practice it first.

To teach a dog to listen on walks outside the home, I decided to do a little training inside first. The idea is to help the dog practice listening to, obeying and being rewarded for compliance in the easiest situation possible. For most dogs, the best place to do this is inside the house.

You can watch me train a dog to listen to people on walks by watching the free positive dog training video below.

This is an easy way to get a dog to listen to you on walks as long as you practice frequently and don’t move onto the next stage until the dog has demonstrated a consistent reliability. Many people are tempted to move too far too fast and this often results in an unstable foundation and inconsistent results from the dog. Teaching a dog to listen on walks isnt hard, you dont have to be a professional German Shorthair Pointer dog trainer to do it if you follow the steps in the above video.

The guardian should also work on teaching the dogs to be calm when the leash is attached. Here is a link to a video that shares the secret to getting a dog to stay calm when being leashed up.

In addition to this secret to getting dogs to listen and pay attention on walks, we covered a number of other dog behavior tips in this in-home Santa Monica dog training session. To help the guardian remember them, all we recorded a roadmap to success video that you can watch below.

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This post was written by: David Codr