Walk this way. Talk this way.

“The walk” has been an inter­est­ing topic in train­ing lately. Does it have mys­tic pow­ers to cure behav­iors and make calm sub­mis­sive dogs? Let’s think about it.…. logically.

Think­ing that walk­ing a dog will cure behav­ior prob­lems is just as silly as think­ing walk­ing will cure your fear of spi­ders. Exer­cise is not teach­ing. How­ever, it is required for a good qual­ity of life.

When you sign up to care for a pet, it is essen­tial to know how to care for him. At the most basic of basic lev­els they require food, water, phys­i­cal & men­tal stim­u­la­tion, shel­ter, and med­ical care. These are required at the appro­pri­ate amounts as well. You’re not going to feed a Chi­huahua three cups of food, five times a day. That’s retarded. So why do so many peo­ple think over walk­ing a dog is a good idea?

Many cases Sit Stay & Play takes on, sadly we are not the first trainer. And in a good major­ity of anx­i­ety & aggres­sion cases, prior train­ers gave bad advice. About 90% of our clients prior train­ing advice was to over walk their dog, so it doesn’t walk ahead of them, with about a nine inch leash. So let me trans­late this. “Walk your dog right next to you to cre­ate a huge blind spot, with a short tight leash so it feels like there is no flight option, a whole bunch for long peri­ods of time to make sure the dog is over thresh­old.” Sadly this only increases stress, fear, anx­i­ety, frus­tra­tion, and aggres­sion. And behav­ior prob­lems get worse. I truly don’t under­stand where the logic is.

Client: “Hi. My dog hates other dogs“
Faux Trainer: “Well just phys­i­cally exhaust him. That’ll fix it.”

Can you see the lack of actual teach­ing? If we take an exam­ple and apply it to another species, us, maybe it would make more sense. If your child doesn’t like get­ting a shot at the doctor’s are you going to exer­cise him and think that will make things eas­ier? Or will you go out for ice cream when the doctor’s visit is fin­ished? The con­se­quence deter­mines the emo­tion con­nected to the behav­ior. And the walk has noth­ing to do with the process. Now let’s pre­tend to do what a lot of une­d­u­cated train­ers advise: which is to “reso­cial­ize” (their words, not mine). In this case you would walk your kid up and down the halls of a hos­pi­tal around lots of doc­tors with lots of nee­dles. Again, way over thresh­old, and hardly humane.

One case we had was with an anx­ious dog who was a destruc­tive chewer. His own­ers were given the walk advice. And they lis­tened. And the dog got worse. What hap­pened is this cycle of: anx­ious dog, over walked and pushed too much phys­i­cally, cre­ates more anx­i­ety, cre­ates more chew­ing, cre­ates own­ers to walk dog more.….

Now ques­tion the other part of “the walk.” Why is it nec­es­sary to walk behind the per­son? Where is it writ­ten that dog own­ers are not allowed to have a casual stroll with their dog? As long as the dog isn’t pulling and is walk­ing where you want to go, what is the problem?

Think. Ques­tion.