Dog Harnesses are Helpful When Training Your Dog to Walk on a Leash
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We’ve all heard the phrase “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” This popular phrase is pretty accurate when it comes to teaching your dog. When you are trying to teach your dog to walk on a leash, it’s best to teach them before they have a habit of pulling against a leash.
It is far easier to train a puppy than an adult dog. Teaching your dog while they are young will help them avoid bad habits, and save you a lot of frustration in the long haul. A good way to train a puppy is to use a dog harness.
Since a puppy won’t be able to throw their weight around a harness can be a great training tool. It will help you have control over your dog because the harness is placed around your dog’s body instead of just its neck. It also allows you more freedom of training them without accidentally hurting them in the process.
When you are teaching a puppy to learn to walk with a leash you may have to pull and tug on the leash to get them to pay attention. Dog collars, if not put on correctly, can actually do more harm than good. Pulling hard on an ill-fitted collar can damage your dog’s throat.
That is why a harness can be so helpful. The best training technique is one that is pain free. A dog harness keeps your tugs from potentially harming your dog’s throat.
Start out slow so your dog learns to walk with you instead of against you. They eventually will understand the need to slow their pace and keep the leash slack during the walks. When they do this you can walk a little faster to see how your dog does.
Keep a strong grip on the leash when you are training. Start out with a short leash and slowly give them more and more of the leash as they learn to keep slack in the leash. Eventually you won’t have to worry about the length of your dog leash.
Training a puppy can be hard work, but it is a lot easier than training an adult dog. If you do have a dog, not a puppy, that needs to be trained read our previous article written about training a dog not to pull against a leash. We also have tips for adult dog owners training dogs on a leash, and reasons why a training collar could be a more appropriate choice than a full body dog harness.
Tags: Dog Harness, walk on leash
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 7:58 am and is filed under Dog Harness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.