Some Loose Leash Walking Tips Help a Pair of Midtown Dogs

For this Omaha dog training session we worked on loose leash walking with a 1 year-old Pit Bull mix Odessa and her room mate 5 year-old Boxer, Albus.

Dogs pull on the leash for many reasons so I spent the first half of this session going over the dog’s daily lives to determine if there were any things the humans were doing that may be contributing to the problem.

Turns out the dogs really didn’t have any rules, were able to get rewarded on demand and had learned to misbehave to get attention.

I showed the guardians how to add structure in the form of rules and how to enforce them. I also explained how important it is to reward desired behaviors from their dogs so they know positive things to do to attract their human’s attention.

Odessa has developed a fence fighting behavior with the back yard neighbor’s dog. Im hoping flipping the leader follower dynamic will help reduce this unwanted dog behavior, but also made a few management suggestions.

A great way to help the dogs start getting on better is to get them walking together, but before that can happen, Odessa needs to learn to stop pulling on the leash. In the video below I share a ton of free loose leash walking tips that should help.

We had to stop the above video short due to some fence fighting. You can get the final loose leash training secrets in the roadmap to success video at the bottom of this write up.

We headed out front for some more loose leash training where I had the guardians practicing u turns, stopping frequently to ask for a sit and how / when to redirect the dog or disagree with unwanted behavior before it starts.

Once Odessa can walk with a loose leash next to her guardian, they may want to start doing this with the neighbor dogs they are fence fighting with. Now a few caveats to this suggestion.

• Only two dogs per walk; Odessa and one of the neighbor’s dogs at a time.
• They should  only try walking the dogs together if both dogs will walk next to their guardian on the leash. Neither dog can be out front for this to help.
• If the neighbor’s dog likes to pull on the leash or walk in front, the guardians may want to share this post with them first.
• The dogs both need to be sub threshold (calm). If either dog reacts to the other, they should increase the distance until the dogs can walk / be around one another without barking.
• They may need to walk across the street at first, then gradually decrease the distance between one another.
• Avoid telling the dog “it will be ok” or petting them if they are reacting to the other dog. Instead immediately increase distance until they can calm down.
• They may find the walks go better by exercising the dogs separately first. They can do this with a walk, game of fetch, etc. Just make sure the dogs can catch their breath before going on the group walk.

Im hoping that flipping the leader follower dynamic, increasing exercise and group walks with the neighbor dogs will stop the fence fighting for good. If tis still happening a month from now after mastering all the changes made at this session, we may need to schedule a follow up visit.

To help the guardians remember all the positive dog training tips we went over in this in home dog training session, we shot a roadmap to success video (three times, lol) that you can watch below.