All Things Dog Blog

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Stopping Leash Biting

By Kevin Duggan, CPDT-KA

When you’re walking your dog does he ever decide to play a little tug-o-war with the leash? Do you find this to be a little annoying or downright uncontrollable? This is a pretty common problem that a lot of people are dealing with. This is something that I help a lot of my clients with, as well as a lot of shelter dogs.

Why do dogs even find this to be enjoyable? The simple answer is because the dog’s behavior is reinforced. The dog wants to play tug, and if he gets any sort of tug back, that causes more tugging. It’s a vicious cycle.

So what can we do to prevent this cycle from happening? My answer is to be proactive,

instead of reactive. What I mean by this is instead of waiting for the dog to do it, and then trying to figure out what to do, give him something to do. Some examples of things he can be doing are, looking at you, touching your hand, “leaving” the leash, and walking nicely by your side. These all sound pretty simple and in fact they are. All we have to do is practice cueing our dogs to do those things and reward those behaviors. This will cause those behaviors to happen more frequently in the future. In the video below I demonstrate how to do all these things.

Remember to stay patient, upbeat, and to have some high value treats. The combination of these three things will help you achieve your goal.

Kevin Duggan is a certified professional dog trainer certified by the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers. He has been training professionally for 5 years.

Kevin loves working with dogs and helping them mesh better into their homes. He does this by teaching the dog what we would like it to do, and reinforcing the behavior. This is also known as Positive Reinforcement. Kevin specializes in building positive relationships between humans and their canine companions.