Leash Manners

[Tor]

Hi DOL brains trust!

I'm back with more questions.

Sebastian, my nearly 12 month old boxer is going really well. He knows lots of commands and is a dream around the house. He goes to training once a week and is generally pretty good, He's excellent off lead with other dogs But, when we leave the house on lead we have a few problems ????.

Basically he's still super excitable and although he's not a constant puller, he definitely lunges towards stuff he's interested in. And he's *reallly* strong. The worst time is between the car and the dog park, he will wait politely in the car until given the ok, but when he hits the ground it's a different story.

Ive been generally trying to do the "be a tree" when he pulls or reverse and go the other way. This has kind of worked, but it's not really decreasing the amount he pulls, just correcting it in the moment. I've always just wanted him to walk on a loose leash, not right next to me or anything.

I'm now wondering if what I need to do is train a more intensive heel so that I'm training an alternative behaviour to lunging. Today, after we got home from his off leash running with dog friends, I took him out the front and did some heeling work with him for ten minutes. Basically two steps, halt and he sits - mark and treat. We also did some turning.

I let him sniff around a bit too, telling him "go free" and then getting his attention again to heel.

He did well, but did need multiple reminders to come back and not surge ahead. Each time he did I marked with "uh uh" and brought him back to the heel position, luring with a treat. We finished on a good note, he ended up sticking close and giving lots of eye contact.

Does this sound ok? Should I avoid leash walks until he's really got this down? How much should I increase the time he's expected to heel? I'm worried he'll get bored and stop enjoying his walks.

I can try practicing near the dog park when he's ready for more distraction. I don't know, I'd love any advice!

[RuralPug]

Have you tried the rapid zigzag walk? Throw in a few random U - turns as well. For some pullers, this works like magic as they suddenly realise that they'd better keep an eye an what you're doing or get constantly left behind!

But if he is not so pulling so much as simply lunging at distractions, then possibly you need to concentrate on changing his response to distraction. Look up the "Look at That!" or LAT training (there is plenty of info if you Google), this may help.

[Tor]

Thank you! We had tried some LAT but need to do that more. I find it hard to coordinate, keeping him far enough away to be under threshold etc. Plus he tends to snap his head up to me and then snap right back to the distraction, I'm not quite sure where to go theee. I'm working on building his attention but it's a frustratingly slow process