Leash training your puppy is an essential part of obedience and discipline. Leash training will get your puppy out of the house to learn socialization skills and how to behave in public. These are called Leash Manners. Here are three tips to help leash train your puppy.
- Keep the walks short, about 5-10 minutes. Long walks for young puppies ages 8-24 weeks could result in them losing focus and energy, enabling them to check out and develop unwanted behaviors.
- Focus on discipline and obedience while on the walks. Have your puppy go out in your driveway or sidewalk and sit. They must learn patience and be desensitized to distractions such as other dogs, people, and cars.
- Finish the walk with a calming ritual on the puppy's bed when they come inside from the walk. This conditions them to develop the habit of exercise followed by relaxation. You can use a Kong, Lickimat, bully stick, or a deer antler to help them settle.
More tips can be found in my book Leash Training Your Puppy, available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and audiobook. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BVGJ3DPQ
Online course, Leash Training Your Puppy: https://www.puppytraining.dog/leash-training-your-puppy
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Welcome to Puppy Talk podcast number 82. I'm your host, Dale Buchanan, and today I am gonna give you three tips to help lease Train your Puppy. You can find more tips and more instruction on lease training your puppy in my book actually called Lease Training Your Puppy available on Amazon in Kindle ebook, paperback and audiobook. In addition, I've got an online course called Lease Training Your Puppy. You can find the links to both of these in the show notes. Let's get started. Lease training your puppy is an essential part of obedience and discipline. Lease training will get your puppy out of the house to learn socialization skills and how to behave in public. We call these leash manners. Tip number one, keep the walks short, about five to 10 minutes. You don't want to go for 30, 45, 60 minutes with a young puppy under six months old for one, you're conditioning your puppy to be a marathon dog to just keep building up their tolerance for long walks, and you're gonna need to keep taking them on long walks.
If you start that early on, they may not be able to do it depending on the breed, and most puppies check out after about 10 minutes anyway, so five to 10 minute walks. If they're under six months old, make sure that they stay focused and they do not check out, and they do not start to develop unwanted behaviors. If they do, it's time to go back inside. Tip number two, focus on discipline and obedience. While on the walks I teach my clients to leash up the puppy, go to the front porch, sit and wait, go to the driveway, sit and wait. Go to the sidewalk in front of their house, sit and wait. You get the idea that the puppy needs to learn patience and also be desensitized to all of the stimuli that comes along. They need to be desensitized to other dogs, people, cars, bikes, airplanes, all types of sights and sounds.
Puppies need to go outside and learn that all of these things that they don't experience in the house are part of life. Desensitizing them while on the walk is a high level of puppy socialization that you need to do. Early on, when I got Dixie, I started least training her the very first hour that I had her. I had her on a slip lead in front of my apartment, and I started walking her very early on to learn to get social greet. People see other dogs from a distance and so forth. Now she's a therapy dog, so you really want to start this process off early with your puppy to get them out of the house and socialized on the sidewalk on the street in the driveway. If you're concerned about vaccines and taking your puppy outside in the grass, I have another podcast episode that I
Will link in the show notes on that topic. Tip number three, finish the walk with a calming ritual on the puppy's bed. When they come inside from the walk, this conditions them to develop the habit of exercise followed by relaxation. You can use mental stimulation, food puzzles, such as a Kong or a li mat. You can also use things for them to chew on, such as bully sticks or deer antler, and I suggest the split deer antler so the puppy can chew the bone marrow inside the deer antler. That's what they really like. That's what they're really after. If you get a deer antler that's complete, then they may not be able to get to the bone marrow and they're just gonna check out from it pretty quickly. Conditioning your puppy, that when the walk is over to come inside and decompress is really important for the calming behavior inside the house.
Have the puppy learn that. Inside the house is a yoga studio, calm and relaxed. Out back is playtime. That's the nightclub. That's where they go, and they can have fun and run and do a lot of recalls and chase the ball and so forth. Out front on a leash is discipline and obedience. This is the classroom. This is where they learn everything, and it's really important that you do not check out yourself by using your cell phone, for example, or being distracted by something else while you're least training a young puppy. Least training is not necessarily taking the puppy for a walk. I have a lot of clients that take their puppies for long walks, but there's no training involved. There's no mental stimulation. The puppy does what it wants. It zigzags left and right. It pulls out front, it goes in the grass all the time. It's picking things up in their mouth. This is not least training. This is teaching the puppy that they can do whatever they want and there's nothing wrong with that. I call that an enrichment walk, but you wanna limit those at the beginning and focus more on potty breaks and lease training like we're talking about here. Again, if you need more information on this, check out my book and my online course linked in the show notes. If you have any other questions, you can contact me through the website, puppy talk podcast.com. Have a great day.