Dog Logic: Companion Obedience by Joel M. McMains

Author:Joel M. McMains
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howell Book House

Heeling Technique

Move fast and with purpose. Aimlessly shuffling along bores a dog, especially during early stages of teaching heeling. Moving quickly requires fixating attention on you. It causes having to work at staying with you, which is the whole idea. If you try to make heeling easy, your pal can lose interest for want of stimulation.

Keep your eyes on pooch and his attention on you. Much of what you should be teaching him is to use his powers of concentration. This doesn’t mean the animal has to keep his eyes riveted on you during heeling. That makes for nervous walking (try it yourself: walking without looking where you’re going) and smacks of enslavement, which is hardly the goal. The animal has to keep track of your whereabouts; how he does that is his business. Accordingly, should pooch drift to the left, turn right. If he shoots ahead of you, immediately reverse course.

As much as possible, perform only straight-line heeling during this first session. Make no turns except to correct or to keep from walking out of the training area. Second, introduce heeling with short walks between each Sit. Since commands occur less often, uninterrupted, prolonged heeling at this stage only affords opportunity for distraction. Besides, the quicker you walk and the more often you stop, the sooner your companion will learn Automatic Sit (See p. 111). Heeling can get only so good in one session, but the odds are excellent that the Auto-Sit concept can be learned in moments. This is especially true if you command, “Fusssit,” stringing out the “S” sound while taking only one or two heeling steps between Sits. The message, of course, is that Fuss leads to Sit.

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