How to Raise the Perfect Dog (21 page)

MASTERING THE WALK

1. Always begin the walk with calm-assertive energy.
   

2. Don’t chase after your puppy with the tool you are using, be it a simple 35¢ leash like the ones I use, a harness, or a Halti. To your puppy, the tool you are using is an extension of your own energy, so it should have a pleasant (but not overstimulating!] connotation. Let your puppy come to the tool, not the other way around.
   

3. For your very first walk with your puppy, wait at the threshold of wherever you are leaving from, be it a shelter, your car, or your home. Make sure your puppy is in calm-submissive waiting mode beside you, and then step out the door first. Ask your puppy to follow. Whoever leaves the dwelling first, in the puppy’s mind, is leading the excursion. You want that leader to be you.
   

4. Hold the leash in an easy, relaxed manner as if you are carrying a purse or a briefcase. Hold your head high, put your shoulders back. If your puppy begins to pull, pull up lightly on the leash, then immediately release the tension once the puppy gets back into line. Keep the tension loose at all other times. Your puppy should be walking beside or behind you, not pulling to the side or dragging you from in front. If your puppy doesn’t get that concept right away, use an object, like a walking stick or an umbrella, to create an obstacle until she gets the picture. Gently put the object out in front of the puppy’s path in order to create a boundary that will soon become an invisible one.
   

5. If your puppy starts to wander, gets distracted, or seems to balk at moving forward, use a bully stick, a palmed treat, or a scented toy and engage her nose. Then continue to move forward once you have redirected her attention.
   

6. If a puppy gets excited when she sees a commotion or another dog across the street, this is not a signal for you to get excited, too! Keep your focus and, most important, your calm-assertive energy, and continue walking. A slight side-pull correction on the leash will communicate, “Don’t get distracted, keep on walking!” If necessary, turn your puppy’s back to the commotion that is causing the distraction, and make eye contact with her. Wait until she sits, relaxes; then continue on with the walk.
   

7. When you and your puppy have had a successful ten-, fifteen-, or twenty-minute walk, then allow your puppy the freedom to wander a bit on the end of the leash, to smell the ground
   (only if you are in a safe area and/or your puppy has completed her third round of vaccinations)
   or pee and poop. This is a reward. After about three to five minutes, return to your structured walk.
   

8. When arriving at your destination or returning home, repeat the procedure outlined in step 3. Walk through the threshold first, then invite your puppy in after you. Remember, in your puppy’s mind, whoever goes through the door first owns that space! Make sure she is calm and submissive as you remove the leash.
   

Walking correctly with your dog will be the most important skill you can master if you are seeking a deep, lifelong connection. Stick to the basics—always be the first one out the door and the first one to return back in. Always walk with your puppy beside or behind you, never allowing her to pull you from the front or “zigzag” out to the side. Keep the tension on the leash relaxed, and imagine you are carrying a purse or a briefcase. Focus your eyes ahead, don’t stare at your puppy. Most conventional schools of dog training instruct you to keep your dog on your left, but in my experience, you can condition a dog to walk to your right, to your left, or even to do both whenever you want. The key is to have her beside or behind, never out front. If you are having trouble getting your puppy to walk reliably on a leash, choose one side and stick to it until she gets the lesson down cold.

Owners I have helped always marvel at the night-to-day differences they see after they finally master the walk with a formerly troubled dog. For adult dogs, I recommend a minimum of at least a thirty-minute walk twice a day, to drain pent-up energy and for the primal bonding ritual that it signifies. Adding a backpack to an adult dog can help intensify the walk, or make up for time if you can’t do a longer session. For puppies with short legs and even shorter attention spans, walks can be brief—even ten minutes a time in the beginning—but they should still follow the outline above, and you must begin the routine of two or more structured daily walks at your side as soon as your puppy comes home with you. It’s the structure and the ritual that are important here. You are imprinting on your puppy’s malleable brain that this is your routine; this is how one works for food and water.

IMMUNITY AND WALKING

Because a puppy’s immune system will not kick in fully until the third round of shots at around sixteen weeks, many modern owners don’t believe they have to walk their puppies until they are four months old or even older. In fact, some of them are so scared of parvo and other illnesses that they want to encase the puppy in a protective bubble for its first months home. I will never disagree with the advice of a veterinarian when it comes to the physical health of a dog. But a puppy’s psychological development is also a big part of her overall health. From a purely behavioral standpoint, keeping a puppy inside a house and limiting its ability to exercise is a recipe for disaster. Imagine if you had a human child, and you kept him in the house until he was a teenager. What kind of person do you think he’d become? It’s likely he either wouldn’t have any clue how to deal with the outside world and would be timid and antisocial, or he might go to the other extreme, come away bursting with repressed, frustrated energy, and become a force for destruction the minute he got a taste of freedom. An over-protected puppy can have a similar reaction if it is virtually quarantined through adolescence.

There are so many different ways to keep a puppy safe from disease while at the same time making sure you fulfill all her physical and psychological needs. Try mastering the walk on a back patio or in your yard, on your driveway, on a limited, sanitized area outside your home (Chris Komives used a ten-to-one bleach-water solution to spray and sanitize the short portion of his neighborhood sidewalk where he first started walking Eliza), or even on a treadmill inside the house as a last resort (you can run on the treadmill next to the puppy to simulate an off-leash migrating ritual). Swimming alongside a puppy in a pool—especially a water dog—can have much the same effect. Use your imagination, along with your sense of caution, to begin this bonding ritual and the exercise habit right away.

Says Diana Foster:

We always stress walking and exercise. German shepherds are powerful dogs, they’ve got a lot of energy, and they need their cardio. Walk around a parking lot or go down a busy street where there are a lot of cars and buses and noise—you will very rarely see other dogs. Avoid areas where there are vets’ offices or pet stores. Of course, you need to keep them on the sidewalk and don’t let them sniff the ground. That’s not what the walk is for; it’s for structure and for training them to be comfortable on the leash. Just make sure you are walking your puppy in a controlled environment. In our group puppy class, everybody’s checked for shots. I don’t let anybody on the property that is sick at all. If they have a loose stool or a cough or their eyes are weird, they’re not allowed on the property. I tell owners, sure, by all means be careful, but you’ve got to take the puppy out!

OBSTACLES TO THE WALK

Walking a puppy isn’t the same thing as walking an adult dog. A puppy is much more easily distracted. You may need to stop, press the “reset” button on her attention, then start again before she gets into the rhythm of it. Using a scented toy, palmed treat, or bully stick to redirect the nose is a great way to distract a wandering puppy and get her attention back on you. But a puppy also has built-in limits as to how far from home it’s okay to wander.

Recently my wife, the boys, and I had the delightful opportunity to care for some newborn Chihuahua pups and their mother in our home. It was fascinating to watch the three one-month-old puppies and their different responses to the outside world. While two of the puppies would not leave the bed we provided for the little family, one pup of the same litter jumped right off it and explored by himself to a distance of four full feet away. Each of those three puppies is “normal.” But each of those puppies, at three or four months old, will have a different reaction to a walk with a human. When he grows up to be a big boy of three months of age, the “explorer” Chihuahua might follow me half a block away. The other two might not want to go more than a few yards past the driveway.

You as an owner have to be sensitive to your pup’s limits. You definitely need to keep challenging her, but you shouldn’t push her past what her instincts tell her is comfortable. Instead, add a few extra feet every day to your walk. Increase the distance gradually. But don’t force a young puppy into a new place or circumstance if her body shuts down on you. Slow down and let her take in the experience at her own pace. If you continually ignore and block a puppy’s instincts, you will never be able to build the trust necessary to connect truly with your dog. And remember, dogs’ superior instincts—their original five and vaunted sixth senses—are a very large part of what we value them for.

ANGEL AND THE DARK PATHWAY

When Melissa brought Angel home with her for his weekend night sleepaway experience, she and her husband took him on several walks. At my house, Angel was always very courageous, exploring the hedges and mailboxes of several houses on our cul-de-sac long before his pal, Mr. President, dared venture beyond our driveway. He also ranged farther than the other puppies when left to roam at the new Dog Psychology Center. True to form, Angel was gung-ho and cooperative when Melissa and her husband first walked with him along busy Ventura Boulevard at twilight, crossing a busy, noisy street and parading down and back a long California block with no problem at all.

Later in the evening, Melissa took Angel out to relieve himself, then began a shorter walk in a lighted park next to their apartment building, hoping to tire him out one last time before putting him to bed for the night. He trotted happily by her side for a few minutes, but when he saw that the path ahead led to an area where the glow from the streetlights dropped off into darkness, he stopped cold and wouldn’t move forward. “At first, I treated the situation as if it were an adult dog stopping down; I just kept moving forward,” says Melissa. “But Angel wasn’t going to go. He became even more determined when I tried to bring him with me, creating tension on the leash. I tried the bully stick—that had worked before—but he wouldn’t even engage his nose. I signaled him to sit and asked him to make eye contact with me, but his eyes kept darting toward the path ahead. I was wracking my brain for solutions—‘What would Cesar do?’”

Melissa decided to respect Angel’s instincts. She chose to turn around and walk back toward the building, which was the correct solution. It’s not that Angel was afraid of the dark—he’d been out at the Dog Psychology Center in a pitch black night with the rest of the pack. The problem was, this time he was being led by a human—one who may know how to write about dogs intellectually but is not as experienced from an instinctual point of view. On this occasion, Angel’s human companion was not checking out the new situation in the way a balanced dog would check it out. Melissa was barreling ahead without taking the time to smell, or let Angel smell, totally unexplored territory. Angel could not use his nose to check out the dark path looming in front of him, nor could he even use his eyes to see it, so he stopped. That’s using good instincts. Even Daddy might have reacted that way, although as an adult dog, Daddy has learned that he can usually trust the human who is leading him. If Melissa had wanted to move forward, she would have had to let Angel take his time, moving a little bit, smelling, then moving a little bit more, smelling. It might have taken them a half hour to move a few feet forward. That’s because Angel was using his inborn common sense and playing it safe, which is exactly what we want our dogs to do. If we are truly connecting with our puppies and working in partnership with them as they become more confident about new things like strange new places and dark, mysterious paths, we will retain their most valuable instincts, and we will not lose their very precious trust.

ENERGY AND WALKING

In my previous books and on my television show, I continually stress the importance of walking, especially the energy of the owner during the walk.
You must consistently project calm-assertive energy to your puppy if she is to follow you
. It may seem redundant, but there’s a reason for that—I keep coming up against humans who repeat the same excuses. They actually blame a dog for being a bad walker, giving justifications like “She just hates to be on the leash” or “She always wants to pull ahead” when, truly, I have yet to meet a dog of any age that has been unable to learn how to walk.

The precious months of puppyhood offer you a window of opportunity to mold your walks into the ultimate, most joyful bonding experience imaginable. If you do your job now, even when the rebellious period of adolescence kicks in, your dog will be programmed to be an excellent walker. If during adolescence she seems to want to stray, you will always have the tools to bring her back to the routine. And every successful walk you take brings you closer and closer, pack leader to follower. I credit much of my intimate, almost psychic relationship with Daddy to the thousands and thousands of perfect walks we have completed together. But you have to put the time in
now
.

BLIZZARD LEARNS TO WALK

In the two years since my family and I moved to our Santa Clarita Valley home, our neighbors Adriana and Terry Barnes and their kids, eleven-year-old Christian and fourteen-year-old Sabrina, have become our close and valued friends. When we first arrived, however, Adriana wasn’t too thrilled about having the Dog Whisperer living right down the block. She was terrified of big dogs—especially pit bulls. Her blood would run cold whenever she saw me out walking Daddy. But my charming wife, Ilusion, can win anybody over, and Adriana began working with us as we started planning the new Dog Psychology Center on land we had purchased nearby. Adriana found herself around our house—and our dogs—more and more often. Daddy is a pit bull that can change anybody’s mind about pit bulls. “There was just something about Daddy’s eyes,” Adrianna told me. “Such a connection, in those eyes. It made me know I could trust him.” Things changed so much for Adriana, in fact, that now she and Terry help me run the new Santa Clarita Valley Dog Psychology Center. Terry was thrilled, because he was a dog person, and his kids desperately wanted a dog. I let them adopt Molly, a mellow, low-energy dachshund I’d rescued from Ensenada. Life with Molly went so well, the kids—especially Christian—started campaigning for a puppy.