How To Teach Your Dog To Walk To Heel

Hi. My name's Stan Rawlinson. I'm an obedience trainer and a dog behaviorist, and this is Guinness.

Guinness is a working cocker spaniel and he's quite a young dog, and I'm training him to do a number of things. But today, what we're looking at is walking to heel: some of the major problems that people have. Dogs have problems walking to heel for a number of reasons.

The first one is anticipation. We're going to the park! Yeah! And they pull on the lead. Secondly: dominance.

They'll go, I want to lead this one, so I'm going to pull on the way to the park, and on the way back. And then you get the agoraphobics, the ones that only pull on the way back from the park. They're the ones that are normally fearful of traffic, or there's something else that's frightened them outside, and they just want to get back to their haven.

But there's one major reason why dogs pull on the lead. We actually teach them to do it. The law of physics, which is the physics of motion: Sir Isaac Newton said for every action, there's an opposite reaction.

For every yin, there's a yang. For every push, there's a pull. And what do we do? Every time the dog pulls forward, we pull back on the lead.

The law of physics and Newton says, if you do that, the dog has to push forward. Most of the leads are far too short. This lead is five foot eight exactly.

It goes across my body, and it's the right length for all types of training. It's vitally important that you don't have a short lead when you're stopping a dog pulling on the lead. So, if Isaac Newton is right, and I know for a fact he is, then we need to do something very differently to stop our dogs pulling on the lead.

And what I've come up with, I've devised a technique that will stop dogs pulling in a number of minutes. But let's just see what this dog is like at the moment. Come, honey.

Go on! As you can see, he's wandering ahead here, doing his own thing, and really, he should be here. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to put on something that I've devised and developed. Sit! Good! Called the jingler.

And what it will do is it will speed up the training by somewhere in the region of a hundred percent. Instead of a thousand percent, probably! Instead of it taking a couple of hours to get anywhere near him, it's going to take a couple of minutes. And what I'm going to do, I'm going to step off with my left foot, giving him permission to go forward.

When he pulls ahead, instead of pulling the lead back, what I'm going to do is actually drop the lead as if its burnt me. And as I turn, I'm going to jingle the bells as I turn. And he will realize, after a very short period of time that it's him pushing forward that's causing me to have to turn and go the other way.

So it's his fault, not mine that the bells are activating So here we go. Permission to move forward is given by stepping off with the left foot.

Heel! I turn and wave that at him, grab the lead, go the other way. Each time he goes ahead, I do that. Remember what he was doing a couple of minutes ago? In fact, less than that: a couple of seconds.

Sit. Sit. Good.

I want to show you something now. Quite. Something very strange has happened. Heel.

That's what has happened.

Remember what he was like thirty seconds ago, forty five seconds? And that's how long it takes to train a dog to walk to heel if you know what you're doing. No check chains, no choke chains: literally a dog that is doing as we tell it to. Sit.

Good. And all from a little jingly bell. Well done, Guinness. You're a good boy.

You're a clever lad, aren't you? Yeah.Yes, you are. You're a very clever lad.

Good boy.