Dog training tools
Now,
I have to admit that you won't see instant results the first time you
walk your dog correctly. When we got Lucy, she'd been tied up for
months on end and she was wild. I could barely hold her leash as
she galloped up the driveway --- no way I was going to be able to get
her to walk beside or behind me.
So, we bought a couple
of tools to get Lucy to pay attention to us (and to wear down a bit of
her boundless energy!) The one dog-lovers are least likely to
approve of is the Gentle
Leader.
No, this isn't a muzzle --- your dog can open her mouth just
fine. The Gentle Leader is a lot like the harness on a horse ---
it allows you to steer a large, powerful animal by turning its head
rather than by trying to make the whole animal go where you want it
to. The Gentle Leader also puts pressure on top of your dog's
nose if she tries to pull. This simulates the way a pack leader
will put its mouth around a follower dog's nose if the follower
misbehaves, and both the pack leader's mouth and the Gentle Leader's
pressure cue your dog to calm down and listen.
We also bought Lucy a doggie
backpack
and weighed it down with water bottles and gravel. Carrying the
backpack gave her quite a workout, even when walking at human
speed. I think that without the backpack, we would have had to
walk Lucy for a couple of hours a day in the beginning when she was
blowing off her leftover steam from being tied up.
Both the Gentle Leader
and the doggie backpack did their job admirably, but after a few months
Lucy had learned that we were in charge. We slowly stopped using
them --- after all, both were just tools to get our dog's attention.
| This post is part of our Training a Farm Dog lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.