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Pupforum presents your training questions answered by professional dog trainers.
Jean is a graduate of Animal Behavior College and teaches basic obedience using positive motivation training techniques. She is a member of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers and has been teaching family dog basic obedience for three years. Jean is also a graduate of Northeastern University and is the co-founder of pupforum.com.
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11/7/2004
Everybody loves a good retractable leash. You’ve seen them. They’re those leashes with the big plastic handle and a sixteen foot retractable cord that attaches to your dog. I’ve not done a scientific study, but I’d guess that 80% of the dogs you see in my neighborhood on a given day are on one. Retractable leashes give your dog more room to roam around while you walk and you don’t have to worry about taking in the slack on the leash. What a great invention right? I say ugh.
Anyone who has been to a dog basic obedience class recently has likely worked on loose leash walking. Loose leash walking is simply teaching your dog to walk with you with some slack in the leash. It teaches them that they should never pull on the leash during a walk. So what do the retractable leashes teach dogs? That if you pull on the end of the leash, most of the time you will get more leash out of it. Yikes.
That’s not the worst of it though. We work so hard to teach our dogs that they get six feet of leeway from us on a walk. Then they put that little locking mechanism on the retractable leashes. That’s great, now not only does your dog learn that pulling gives more leash, but if the owner gets in the habit of locking the leash at different lengths, the p
oor dog has no idea how far from the owner he can go before he reaches the end. Of course he’s going to pull! He has no idea where the end of the line is!
Every now and again I will pass by a person with a dog on a retractable leash and a gentle leader or a pinch collar. Hello!?! That makes me crazy. Did they think for one second about the purposes of the collars or how the leash works? Let’s get a collar that will encourage the dog not to pull and attach a leash that does. Can you say mixed messages?
Retractable leashes are nice and convenient in the sense that you don’t have to worry about getting tangled up in slack leash and that your dog has more room to roam around. And that’s if you can master the clunky handle and locking button. But no one can tell me that they are not completely counter productive to teaching your dog how to walk politely. If your dog needs more room to roam, buy a longer leash. To my students that have already bought the retractable leashes, I tell them, use them if you must, but please, lock the leash at a certain length and keep it there. And only do that until you manage to get a real leash.
I say, take your retractable leashes and use them on something untrainable, like children or cats ;)
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