The next is to discipline your dog. Often it’s here that we fail our dog and we can loose our temper or apply poor discipline technique. Disciplining your dog cannot be abusive, violent or stressful – these will lead to punishing your dog and ineffective training and possibly lead to behaviour issues.
Good discipline is:
- Consistent
- non-emotive
- non-violent
- Giving the dog rules / boundaries / limitations

Lastly, give your dog affection. You should only give your dog affection when it is in a calm state and only after you have used the first two steps to get it there. Often we are guilty of skipping the first two steps and jumping straight to affection, rewarding our dog when it’s not in a calm state. This leads to behavioural issues.

This can help to improve your dog’s state of mind and fix a lot of the behaviour issues we commonly see in dogs. Often these issues are a direct result of how we relate to our dog. So start implementing exercise, discipline and affection in your behaviour training now.

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Scenario
Time to take the dog for a walk.
We get up from our chair perhaps saying to the dog “walk time”, the dog responds by getting up and coming to life. We head to the bedroom putting on a coat or changing into more appropriate clothing for the walk. During this time we may make more eye contact with our dog and talk to it which leads it to bounce around and often this makes us happy because our dog is happy and can’t wait to go for a walk. So we only encourage this more and more cause we want our dogs to be happy. Usually the next thing is we start to head towards the door and if you come down stairs or walk down a hallway you will find your dog runs towards the door before you can even get there. We may at this time tell our dog to slow down or calm down. As we draw closer to the front door the dog may start to bark and spin around in circles in excitement. At this point we may get our dog to sit, even though it maybe shaking in excitement. We put the lead on our dog and pretty much as soon as the dog hears the click of the lead it stands up and heads straight at the door. It’s about this time that we start to get angrier and our first out-burst maybe here, where we yell at our dog and command it to sit. We open the door and as soon as it opens our dog leaps outside dragging us with them. This makes us even angrier so we pull the dog back to us and attempt to shut the door and maybe we yell out to someone inside that we’re are taking the dog for a walk. We start to head towards the road and all the way our dog is pulling us like a freight train, they may start to sniff a bush then mark it, giving us a little relief before they rocket to the next spot to mark or sniff. It can be quite embarrassing especially when people start to stare at us and watch as our dog drags us down the street. It’s around this time we may either loose it and yell at our dog or just accept that this is what our dog wants on its walk. Often on the walk we can hear the dog choking on the lead which makes us attempt to reason with the dog by telling it to wait or stop, when all this fails we let out more lead which allows it temporary relief before it charges ahead and continues to choke itself. The only way we stop the choking is by walking at its pace. By the time we get home the dog has slowed down and perhaps it may not be pulling much on the lead. That is till we reach our home. When we approach the door our dog starts to again pull at the lead and drag us to the front door. We then open the door and our dog charges in and we look exhausted and find the walk is not enjoyable, rather it’s a chore. From here we start to associate walks with negative thoughts and thus we start to become less incline to take our dog for a walk. It seems hopeless and all the tips our relatives and friends give us just don’t work well or only discourage us. So being a proactive person we start to look around for information on how to walk your dog properly. After googleing “how to stop your dog pulling on a lead” we have found this article. Or maybe you found this other ways – it’s not important. What’s important is that this issue is very common and with some simple tips and consistent training your dog will be walking properly on a lead.