Dog Leash Training - Real World Skills

Leigh Siegfried: Hi, my name is Leigh Siegfried with Opportunity Barks Behavior & Training. Today we are talking about how to teach your dog to walk politely on leash and now what we are going to discuss is how to give your dog a few skills to teach them to focus on you, before you venture out into the real world and walk your dog on the leash. If you feel like you have a dog that's completely unconnected to you, doesn't know you exist there out for a walk, it's recommended that you do some focus work before you actually go into the real world. Remember that you should be using high value food rewards and if you are dog is not food motivated, you want to use something that they will actually work for whether that's a tug toy, praising, patting whatever works for your dog, works for us. So here are some skills to brush up on or to train, teaching your dog a basic sit and most dogs have a nice set already. We will do that by using a treat, we will let them sniff the treat then we are going to just raise our hands slightly about their head and when their butt hits the ground we are going to tell them, "good" and give them a small treat or we are going to use our clicker and click and feed them. The more important thing is actually teaching your dog to be responsive to either their name or a watch. And a watch is just simply look at me and continue to look at me, okay, how we train a watch, is you let your dog sniff little treat, you will bring it next to your eye and when they look up at you, you tell them, good or you click your clicker and give them a small treat. Now, name recognition on the other hand or name game, is just teaching your dog to be responsive to their name when you say it and their name should mean, look at me, just for a second, just, hey look at me. Generally speaking how you train this is very similar to how you train to watch, you say your dogs name, Fido, you will bring the treat next to your eye and when they look at you, you tell them good and give them a treat. It's a great skill to work on when you are teaching your dog to walk outside because generally if you can get your dog to check in with you and look at you either by asking them to watch or by just saying their name and generally have a dog that's not as likely to forge and he is paying attention to where you are but you usually means they are walking beside you. So now we have taught them a few little skills before we venture out to real world, what we are going to do now is talk about another training technique for loose leash walking called passive heeling.