Stop dog from pulling on lead

rawn

We recently adopted a lovely female beagle, between the ages if 8-12. She's well behaved, can be a little forgetful at times, but otherwise great. She has taken well to commands but the one thing we want to train out of her is to stop her pulling on the lead so hard when we walk her. She's very strong and sometimes it can be difficult to walk her. She slows down as she gets more tired but otherwise she is constantly pulling us along. We tried rewarding her when she walks with a slack lead, and stopping her and making her sit when she pulls too strongly but no joy so far. Any advice?

hardCopy

I'm a first time dog owner with an 8 month old pup so can only speak from my own recent experience. Our lad is currently going through leash walking rehab.

I tried a few different methods, reward when slack, stop when pulling, turn around when pulling but his determination/stubbornness beat my impatience every time. I kind of gave up on it until he got too heavy for anyone else to control.

I ended up keeping him indoors for a few days while I regrouped and did some research. Then I started again by luring him into a heel with a treat at my hip and walked him around the house like that. I then started with really short walks up and down the driveway and eventually up the street treating all the time for a heel.

He eventually got bored of the treats and started pulling again but it had broken the habit of pulling enough that I was able to make progress by either stopping or turning around.

It took me a while to spot that he will only walk loose when he is calm, he could be well behaved for a while and then freak out because he saw a dog/cat/car/bus and it would take a few minutes to settle again before he would walk loose.

I then started training a "look" command and rewarding him for making eye contact with me. The rewards is sometimes a treat and sometimes a chew toy. The chew toy is particularly useful if I want to distract him from something that takes a while to pass. I've also started picking quiet spots on the road where he can watch other dogs from a distance and feeding him treats while he watches quietly.

I can now walk him around a regular route in our estate without too much stopping, turning or treating. When I do stop he quickly realises what I'm looking for and slacks off or comes back to my side. There are still a long list of things that set him off that I need to condition him to.

My advice would be to expect progress to be unimaginably slow and almost imperceptible at times. Forget any notions of taking him for long walks for the next while and work in a small space until you get the behaviour you want before gradually adding distractions and duration, i.e. the outside world. All the advice I read in books and online followed fairly similar methods but none ever seem to mention how long it could take to train a calm loose lead walk. I try as hard as I can to NEVER walk forward while he's pulling but there are times when I just have to move away from something that will set him off, e.g two dogs approaching from opposite directions and I'll take a slight setback from rewarding his pulling over a bigger setback from him having an encounter that he's just not ready for.