One of the first things we often have to tell people is that we are not dog trainers. People ask us often to help their dogs to learn to walk on a leash and that isn’t what ourselves or our staff want to do. Our walks are about spending time outdoors with our furry friends. While we are more than willing to work with your dog trainer and to reinforce their commands our primary purpose is to give your dog a break in the middle of the day. Have them spend time with a friendly face as they might be missing you.
The thing with training is that at some point it ends. Learning becomes learned and the training tools go away. The end goal of training should be to have a dog walk with a loose leash on a harness or collar. It shouldn’t be for them to wear the pinch collar or have to be given treats for not pulling until they are 16. The training wheels have to come off at some point and if training doesn’t become trained then, in my experience, the dog becomes worse behaved and even harder to walk.
I was walking a young puppy the other day on a special collar and he kept pulling against it. I soon realized that this dog had no idea what the training tool was. He was fully overwhelmed by his puppy motivations and hadn’t been trained to the training tool. He didn’t know that if he eased up the pulling the pressure would ease up. I quickly showed him and right after that our walk improved further.
The next time I walked this puppy he had outgrown his training tool and I walked him with his normal leash. His behavior on the walk was even worse than it was with no training and I had to question what was being done.
Finding a dog trainer is difficult. There are so many different methods, methodologies, and thought processes out there. The one tip I would offer anyone is to ask how long they will need the training tools and if the answer is forever then that isn’t the right training method. No one should want their dog to walk in a training tool for the rest of their lives. It would be like an adult still wearing pull-ups to bed or riding their bike with training wheels. No one wants to do that, and we shouldn’t want it for our dogs.