Loose Leash Walking: How to Stop Your Dog Pulling
Why dogs pull on the leash and a practical plan to fix it: equipment, the three core exercises, and how to handle real walks while you train.
Dogs pull because pulling works. Every time your dog leans into the harness and the walk continues in the direction they wanted, the behaviour gets paid. Nothing about it is stubbornness or dominance. It’s a reinforcement history, built one walk at a time, usually by us.
Which is good news, because reinforcement histories can be rebuilt.
Before technique: equipment
The right gear doesn’t train your dog, but the wrong gear makes training much harder.
Use: a well-fitted Y-shaped harness with a front clip, or a flat collar for dogs who don’t pull hard. A fixed-length lead of about two metres. Long lines for sniffing walks in open space.
Avoid: retractable leads (they teach the dog that tension is normal and reward pulling by extending), and aversive equipment such as prong, choke or shock collars. Beyond the welfare problem, they suppress the symptom while doing nothing about the reinforcement history, and pain in the presence of other dogs and people is a well-documented route to leash reactivity.
The three exercises
1. Reward the position, constantly
Decide which side you want your dog on and stick to it. Then, indoors, take one step. If your dog is anywhere near your leg, mark and feed at your leg. The position where the food is delivered is the position your dog will keep returning to.
Two steps. Feed. Three steps. Feed. Build slowly. Most people’s first mistake is starting outside; the second is going too many steps too soon.
2. Tension means stop
The moment the leash goes tight, you become a tree. Not a correction, not a yank, just complete stillness. Wait. Your dog will eventually release the tension, usually by looking back at you. That instant, mark it, feed at your leg, and carry on.
You will cover about twenty metres in the first session. That is genuinely fine and it’s the point: you are teaching that a tight leash makes the world stop and a loose leash makes it move. The condensed version of all three exercises is a quicker read if you want to start tonight.
3. Change direction
Before your dog hits the end of the leash, say something cheerful and turn and walk the other way. Reward when they catch up. This builds a dog who tracks where you’re going rather than towing you where they’re going.
The problem with real walks
Here’s the conflict nobody mentions: while you’re training, every ordinary walk is undoing your work, because you can’t be a tree for forty minutes on the way to work.
The solution is to split walks into two kinds and make the difference obvious to your dog:
Training walks: ten to fifteen minutes, high-value food, slow progress, harness front clip. This is where the learning happens.
Sniffing walks: a long line in a field or quiet path where your dog is free to move and sniff. Pulling on a long line in open space isn’t rehearsing the problem in the same way, and sniffing is genuinely more tiring for a dog than distance walking.
A dog whose needs are met on sniffing walks arrives at training walks far more able to concentrate.
Why your dog is perfect at home and hopeless outside
Because dogs don’t generalise. Outside there are smells, dogs, people and noise, all far more reinforcing than a piece of cheese. This isn’t defiance. It’s competition, and you’re losing on value.
Two adjustments: raise your pay grade outdoors (real meat, not kibble), and lower the difficulty (start on the quiet side of the street, not outside the school at pick-up time).
How long it takes
Expect several weeks for a young puppy who has never learned to pull, and a couple of months for an adult dog with years of practice. Progress is not linear, and adolescence, roughly six to eighteen months, will feel like going backwards. It isn’t.
The dogs who end up walking nicely aren’t the ones with a special technique. They’re the ones whose owners kept the criteria low enough for long enough.
Related reading
Go deeper
- How to Stop a Puppy Pulling on the Leash Three exercises that fix leash pulling, the equipment that helps, and why your puppy is perfect indoors and hopeless outside.