Days 235 - 240: Willow · Dog Training Community

Days 235 - 240: Willow

Started to tackle the first few training goals of the year, snow and all.

Prevent jumping at strangers

The first thing we're doing is picking LAT training back up in busy areas, which means she's back on the longline/flexi for some walks round busy parks. I've combined this with the clicker initially. The other part is being a bit more aware and responsible as an owner when she's off lead to prevent her reinforcing the behaviour. I'm always vigilant of other dogs and owners but I'm being extra careful to call her in when I think there's a chance of her going to say hello. That leads me to...

Recall to heel

I've not really started too much active training with this yet beyond giving the "heel" cue whenever she gets close after recall. She's suspiciously started doing it automatically sometimes...

Lead walking

I bought a SWAG headcollar suggested by

@Nick Benger

, because sometimes I need to walk her somewhere without actively training. The hope is that we can eliminate reinforcing that pulling = forward while we train towards the same thing on lead and collar. The problem we face is that she has a history of pulling on a flat collar, but I don't want to train with a harness and I worry with slip leads that she's damaging her throat when she pulls hard. So my main questions are:

Can I replace her flat collar with a different one, or should I consider any/all of them poisoned?
What other options would people recommend?
Do I just exclusively use the headcollar until a point in time where I can reintroduce the flat collar?

Any advice would be welcome!

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