Of course the ideal would be to let our dog walk, run and play free without the leash holding him back or showing him direction. But there are the circumstances obliging us to use the leash. For example what to do when you are outside walking with your dog and he decided to run down the road, or does not obey when you imply that is time to go home.
Although we must say that even with the off leash training there are no guarantees that they will work 100%.
No matter how well you train your dog always will be the possibility that he will follow his natural instincts. Those instincts may lead him into danger. If you are worried some kind of danger may come to your dog if he is left off leash, than there is no other option than to keep him by your side, leashed…although to be honest that is not fair to neither of you.
The first steps in off leash training are to teach him as early as possible, and actually train him off leash. Some of us do the training while keeping them on leash and than wonder why is he not learning.
The training should start around an environment where you have full control of the situation such as in your living room, kitchen etc. These way even the dog will be more focused to his training since also the environment around him is familiar. Once you see the dog is competent at off leash skills you can go ahead and move the training to the yard outside the house (gardened).
Use the Premack principle on him. This consists on taking a desire one has and use it as a reward to do something another wants. In this case the reward for the dog is to be off leash with all the exciting distractions such as the desired behavior, your dog coming in from time to time to check in etc.
Make them to pay attention to you. Hold your dog on the leash until they focus on you than just say ‘good’ and let him free. After doing this repeatedly the dog will learn that if he gives attention to you, they will be rewarded to go off leash.
Than to make him return to you while he wonders around the garden free and passes you by for a moment drop a treat for him and say again ‘good’ and than encourage him to go play again. Doing so he will learn that when he comes to you will be treated and the chance to go off again.
Now when he has learned how to behave around the garden, step up the training to a fenced park. Here he will be in a new environment which means that even his behavior will become unpredictable. Here is where you add new training like recall, leave it and distance downs. But being on a park the dog probably will go crazy from all the distractions around. And we do not need that so is time to use the long leash.
You can always use a long leash up to 50 feet to give the dog the feeling that he is off leash while playing at the park and giving you some control on his movements at the same time. You just need to work on leash management skills and always paying attention to him.
Now before letting your dog off leash entirely, reinforce the training you gave to him in your garden and remember the most important skill is the recall when it comes to reliability. Continue to reward the dog anytime he returns when even when you haven’t recalled him.
