If your dog walks normally with your spouse or family but refuses to leave home alone with you, the first step is to determine what changes between those situations rather than treating it as a general leash-walking problem.
If your dog will walk with your husband, with other family members, and after being driven somewhere else, but will not readily leave home alone with you, I would not begin by asking how to make your dog walk.
My first question would be: What changes when you become the only person taking your dog away from home?
That distinction matters because your dog has already demonstrated that he can walk. The problem appears under a more specific set of circumstances.
Why will my dog walk with my husband but not with me?
Because changing the person handling the leash can change the entire situation from your dog's perspective.
Consider a dog like Max, a young pit bull mix whose owner reports that he walks normally alone with her husband. He will also walk when the wife is accompanied by her husband or children. If she drives him somewhere else, he generally walks there too. The difficulty appears primarily when she leaves directly from home with him by herself. Those differences are useful information. If we simply label Max as a dog who “won't walk,” we throw away some of the most important evidence in the case.
He does walk.
He just doesn't perform the same way under every combination of handler, location, and circumstances. Before deciding how to train this, I would want to understand that difference.
Does this mean Max is afraid of me?
No. Refusing to walk with one person in one situation does not establish that your dog is afraid of that person.
There are many variables changing at the same time.
The handler changes. The number of people present changes. Your dog's starting location matters. The direction of travel may matter. Your dog's expectation about what happens next may matter. The location may matter. The age of your dog may matter. Your demeanor may matter.
What we know appears to be behavioral: your dog reportedly walks under some conditions and resists under another. Not a lack of skill.
Why that difference exists still needs to be determined.
This is one reason I try not to let a label become the explanation. Saying that a dog is “stubborn,” “anxious,” “protective,” or “afraid” can sound like we have solved the problem when we may have only renamed it. And the name is probably misdiagnosing the problem(s).
Did one frightening walk cause the problem?
A frightening incident could be relevant, but its timing alone does not prove that it caused the current behavior.
In Max's history, let’s say there was an incident shortly after his adoption in which his leash became caught around a garbage can. The garbage can fell, he became frightened, escaped from his harness, and ran home. I would certainly want to know about that. But I would not automatically conclude that Max now refuses to walk because he remembers the garbage can. Especially if it didn’t happen with the wife around.
We often won’t know what a dog associated with a triggering event, how his behavior changed afterward, whether the current difficulty started immediately, or whether other experiences contributed.
There is an important distinction here:
A plausible explanation is not yet the same thing as a demonstrated cause.
That matters because the explanation we choose tends to determine the training we attempt.
It is not unusual for owner to assume this caused that… maybe it did and maybe it didn’t.
What should I look at before trying to fix the walking problem?
Start by identifying exactly where your dog's behavior changes.
“Won't walk with me” is the final description. I would want considerably more detail.
For example:
- Does your dog willingly come to the door?
- Does he go through the door normally?
- Does he stop on the porch, driveway, sidewalk, or farther away?
- Does he resist one direction more than another?
- What does he do immediately before stopping?
- Does he look toward the house?
- Does he become more willing if another family member walks the first 50 feet?
- What happens if that person then turns back?
- Is the behavior different at different times of day?
- Is there a particular location associated with the difficulty?
- Can you walk your dog inside your home and back yard?
- How quickly does your dog change when the direction turns back toward home?
Those observations can tell us far more than the general statement that your dog doesn't want to walk.
This is the difference between trying a training technique and assessing the problem before selecting the technique.
Should I pull my dog when he refuses to walk?
I would not make pulling your dog farther down the street the solution to this problem.
Moving your dog's body is not necessarily the same thing as changing the reason your dog is reluctant to continue.
If your dog is already struggling with the departure, sustained leash pressure can create an additional conflict without telling us why the problem occurs. If you trap a dog, you csn panic them further and make the problem much worse.
I would instead try to find the point at which your dog is still willing and able to participate normally. That feeds into the diagnosis, which then can lead to a solution.
That might initially be the sidewalk.
It might be halfway down the driveway.
It might be several houses away.
That distance is information.
How do I start teaching my dog to walk away from the house with me?
Truthfully, you shouldn’t. Your dog isn’t an experiment, every dog is an individual, and you probably don’t have the expertise to figure out the core reason(s) why this is happening. Your job, instead, is to collect some data for your dog trainer.
How do I know whether the training is working?
Begin the training program. Look for improvement in the quality of the departure, not merely an increase in distance.
That might include your dog leaving with less hesitation, recovering more quickly, willingly repeating the exercise, showing less conflict at a previously difficult location, or remaining able to engage normally as distance increases.
Distance can eventually increase too.
But distance is an outcome.
It should not be the only measurement of progress.
If you have to apply progressively more pressure to travel progressively farther, the fact that you reached the end of the block does not necessarily mean the training is succeeding.
When should I get professional help?
Professional assessment makes sense when you can answer most of the above questions. Yes, a good dog trainer can puzzle this out without your input, but your observations will speed things along.
That matters.
However, since this is happening at your home, it isn’t reasonable to assume that the problem will be fixed sending your dog away to be trained AWAY from your home without you being part of the solution. A dog who walks perfectly well around a trainer's facility or after being driven to a park may not demonstrate the problem you need evaluated and solved.
The useful question is not simply whether your dog knows how to walk on a leash.
It is what happens in the specific environment and situation where the behavior changes.
Possible physical discomfort should also be considered whenever a dog's willingness to move changes in a way that could have a medical component.
What is the most important thing to do first?
Do not begin by trying to make your dog complete the walk he is refusing.
Your dog already walks.
He walks with Dad. He walks with the family. He walks in other locations.
So I would not initially treat this as a general walking problem.
I would treat the differences between those situations as evidence and let those differences guide the assessment.
The training should follow from what we learn, not from the label we gave the behavior at the beginning.
If your dog is having a similar problem and you are not sure what is changing between the situations where the behavior succeeds and fails, an in-home assessment can help identify the relevant variables and build the training plan from there.
You can learn more about working with me at SamTheDogTrainer.com
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