After writing about pets here on Pet Helpful for nearly 3 years, I’ve seen a lot of tips and hacks for getting your puppy ready to walk on a leash. We brought a puppy home a year ago in March, and I tried lots of the tips that I’d learned. Some of them worked while others were a fail. I wish that I had seen this tip that Kristen, AKA kz_doodles on Instagram, shared about getting your puppy leash-ready without ever leaving the house. It’s a total game-changer!
The first time you put your puppy on a leash, they have no idea what it is or does. Kristen recommends tethering your puppy’s leash to a door inside the home so that they can get used to not being able to get away from it and become comfortable wearing it. Watch on as she explains how the process works. It’s so simple!
In the video’s caption, Kristen says that she uses tethering as a training tool a lot because it teaches puppies patience, calmness, focus, and pull-and-release. She also shares that this is the first time the puppy in the video, Sid, has ever been on a leash. So, we were watching a training method and got to see firsthand how it worked!
Related: Puppy Academy Staff Offer Tips on When and How to Start Leash Training
Viewers Had Mixed Reactions to Tethering a Puppy
Viewers left more than a thousand comments about Kristin’s tethering technique. I don’t usually read comments until after I watch the video, and while I thought this was a great idea for introducing a puppy to the leash, almost everybody else who watched the video disagreed.
Viewer @nyscotties was angry, “I could not disagree with you more. This is NOT good advice. It’s a clumsy, unnecessarily rough technique with no attention paid to how dogs learn best. This can be damaging to a puppy’s neck and it doesn’t involve their learning about walking with you, at your heel, with or without a leash. I suggest that anyone who is considering this kind punishment- based, (learn by painful experience) training instead go look up Puppy Culture and learn about how puppies learn and how to train them properly. Your puppy deserves better than this!”
@itissashafierce agreed, “Poor training – don’t take advice from people who aren’t knowledgeable in dog training.” @candacestidham78 added, “Dog trainer here! Good way for your puppy to hang itself… especially if you get pulled away or step away… it only takes a split second for something drastic to happen. This is not how you train a puppy.”
There were hundreds of comments like these, and only a few I ran across that approved of this method. @mvr1912 shared, “No need to be so nasty. She said before a walk you can do this. She didn’t say she wasn’t going to train the dog to walk at all. Though I think she should use a padded halter, this isn’t a bad idea.”
@whitedaisyeh also felt strongly about the negative backlash Kristen received, “With EVERYTHING in life there’s an “introduction” period, where we and most living beings discover something for the very first time. This step comes WAY BEFORE teaching the puppy how to walk with you, heel, or walk off leash. Please use some critical thinking. This is simply a way to introduce the puppy to a leash for the first time ever in their whole life. I start by letting them smell it for a few minutes and then I do something very similar except I prefer to hold it myself. Omg you’re so irritating!”
I did a quick Google search, and there are people on both sides of the fence about whether or not tethering is a good training method. Ultimately, it’s the pet parent’s decision, so do your research to learn about the pros and cons of this leash training method to determine if it’s right for you and your pup.
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