Puppy Training: Loose Leash Walking With Rumour (Updates)

We are back with some updates on Rumour and her loose leash walking training. Tonight we worked on weaning off of the food lure, introducing longer periods of loose leash, walking, and introducing some minor distractions. We did this over the course of a few 5 minute sessions.

For the longest time, I focused more on teaching pet dogs to learn to be calm.

I was hesitant to integrate a lot of play into obedience exercises, because most students struggled from having too much activity in their dogs rather than too little.

But play can be such a useful tool for learning simply because both you and your dog are having fun in the process. Oh, So could it be possible that you can teach calmness in your loose leash walking this way?

As it turns out, it seems as though you can, and you can do it very well, so long as the rules of the game are clear. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by how consistent she was in maintaining the rest of my criteria in loose leash walking even when working in a higher state of excitement.

I loved her unwavering focus when she is walking with me, even when I removed the food lure from the training session. I also loved that she remembered to stop beside me every time I stopped as well.

Her love of the food chasing game even over rode her desire to pay any sort of extended attention to the minor distractions, laying on the ground.

Now that I've developed the base picture of what I want her loose leash walking to look like, my next session will focus on introducing more distractions to teach her to work through.

Onwards and upwards!

Want to learn how we teach reliable loose leash walking? Our Obedience Fundamentals class is starting and we'll show you exactly how we're getting the results here. Spaces are limited for our classes so sign up now before they're gone!

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