I have a pulling dog, comes by it honestly as he’s part husky. He’s pretty okay IF he’s walked alone. If there’s another dog along, he has to be in front and pulling like a steam train. It’s super annoying! I’ve used every kind of collar and harness known to man and nothing worked. He yanked against a prong collar until he ripped bloody holes in his neck. He gave himself a scarred face fighting to get out of a Gentle Leader. He’s hard to fit with a harness because he’s smooth coated, deep chested with a relatively narrow head in relation to his body so he can and does pull backward out of harnesses. The only harness that’s ever worked on him is the poorly named Walk Your Dog With Love harness. It fits better than most harnesses and controls the dog really well, better than the usual front pull harnesses that constrict. He HATES it when he zooms forward, only to find himself circling me on an ever shortening leash. I’d say this one’s a good experiment to try and it’s not terribly expensive. Use this thing along with the turn around and walk the other way method and eventually I think you’ll break even the stubbornness of a JRT.
Prong collars are wonderful for any dog who walks like a shithead. It’s that, or deal with a dog who continues to walk unsafely.
They are not choke chains. Those involve the owner providing correction (pain/discomfort) to stop bad behavior. Prong collars involve the dog changing its behavior to avoid an uncomfortable stimulus. In operant conditioning terms, that’s positive vs. negative punishment (and if you’re not familiar with those terms, please note that the terms have nothing to do with positive or negative value). You should only be leading firmly, not tugging on the collar yourself.
Try to find a dog trainer that give classes in training ,this will be a lot cheaper than one on one training . How long is the leash you’re using , a shorter one may be easier as your dog can’t pull as much .
Hire a dog walker and explain your dog needs leash training.
You’ll be able to safely walk the dog after a few weeks of training.
Try a backpack made for small dogs with a couple of small cans or water bottles inside for added weight. It worked like a miracle for my dog. It was her job to carry the backpack whenever we went for a walk. Because she was a working breed, she needed a job.
Outward Hound is one manufacturer.
Lumix said six feet in post #19.
I initially used a choke collar on my dog & she would pull (when encountering other dogs) so aggressively that she’d be gagging, but would still continue pulling in spite of the negative consequences. The prong collar (recommended by both trainers) changed everything. I’d encourage the OP to give it a try. Was a total game changer for us.
Here’s her photo. Her name is Emma
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt2n0h6zb1ir13f/P9120235.JPG?dl=0
Cutie!
I have used a prong collar over a choke collar (prong collars only close to a certain point, and no more, while choke collars just keep closing) with a particular dog who needed one, and stopped using it when her training had been accomplished. The trainer I worked with recommended it after assessing the dog over several sessions. He recommended it for maybe three out of ten dogs in the class. They were all muscular, fairly large dogs, who were in the slow group in the obedience class.
I don’t think prong collars are inherently cruel, but not all dogs need them, and not all dogs are right for them. JRTs are kinda small, albeit, not as small as Chihuahuas. Also, there are different sized prong collars. You can get small, light ones for smaller dogs.
TL;DR prong collars, IMHO, are in the “never say never” category, but definitely to be used sparingly and only after consideration.
Honestly I do not see a training collar as cruel and unusual punishment when used correctly (it seems to be that being constantly pulled across the neck with a regular collar is nastier than a proper correction with a training collar) but it seems to miss a key thing for this particular dog. She heels and behaves fine inside the house. She knows what proper heeling is. The issue is her dealing with the appeal of the distractions (potential prey) of outside.
Her owners need to find out how to make themselves more interesting than the distractions when outside. Doing lots of training with her highly mastered basic commands first not while heeling while outside and distracted and with high value treats is step one, building up from success with her sit and down to learning that she gets treats while in proper position. Do that training enough outside and first the outside becomes less novel and second she begins to realize that outside is where paying attention to you gets the treats the most often.
Unfortunately, it’s working against nature with a JRT–they’re all about following their noses, hunting small squeaky creatures down and dispatching them and being terriers once they shift into that mode they’re very hard to shift OUT of it.
OP, what happens if you walk her outdoors but still in the yard on a leash? In the yard is usually very ho-hum for a dog with no new smells or interesting stuff, does that calm her down enough to walk nicely as she does indoors? Of course, this is assuming you HAVE a yard, which I’m not sure of!
My dog as a puppy had a very strong prey drive, and pulled on the leash, went after bunnies, went after neighborhood cats. We first tried a kind of harness that turned him toward us if he pulled ahead. I forget its name. But he hated, hated, HATED the harness. Any harness. He just does not like them. (He also does not like to wear a bandanna, a Christmas ribbon, or a mortarboard with a tassel for his puppy kindergarten graduation. Not into clothing at all, and he doesn’t like to see other dogs wearing shirts, either.)
But he doesn’t mind the prong collar and it did work.
Note that we did not ever yank it. We only held it and let him do the yanking when he went bounding off while we were calling him back. It only took a couple of times before he learned to behave on a leash. It was really fast, a lot faster than the thing where you walk a couple of steps and as soon as the dog pulls, you stop, or reverse direction. We did that for weeks with not much apparent effect.
Now he knows that he can go nuts on a leash when we say so for exactly 16 feet. I say “whoa” when he’s getting close to the end of the leash, but really, he knows. He runs crazy circles around me and gets some exercise. He’s not on a prong collar any longer but he still stops. It’s great.
(Oh, and by the way, Flexi leashes don’t really put that much tension on a dog. I think the ones for small dogs have even less tension. I have a medium dog. But it’s true that using a six-foot leash is better for training. But if you have a Flexi leash, you can make it a six-foot leash by locking it at six feet and leaving it locked.)
Read that article. Positive training techniques do not always work. With headstrong breeds it is a joke.
Injuries to the dog? No, hardly. And if the owner is injured then the trchnique is poor.
Group training classes failed with headstrong breeds. Positive reinforcement and several recommended trainers could not succeed with some breeds and behaviors.
With a prong collar you don’t need to yank. But with a regular collar, if the dog is a strong puller and does not otherwise respond to other training techniques, you can bet that yanking can likely succeed. I’ve seen it several times.
That’s pretty much the method I used for the dear departed Daisy-Dog and it basically worked. However, a Jack Russell is generally a little dynamo. A little dog like that is going to need a lot of exercise to burn off energy. I’d suggest watching a couple episodes of The Dog Whisperer - he seems to know what he’s doing. That whole harness collar never seems to work against pulling. As I understand it, it just reinforces the pull behavior by challenging the dog - equal and opposite reactions and all that.
When it all shakes loose, good training will solve a lot. Be the dog’s leader and you can train him to mow your lawn if you want to.
As usual in threads such as this, folk who claim “dominance” training has been “disproven”, confuse opinion with proof. An article or blogpost is not the same as a controlled, reproducible study. The fact that a trainer/writer you favor disapproves of something does not establish that their approach has valid proof. Of course, exerting dominance ought not be done in anger or confused with abuse.
Train your dog however you wish. I’ll continue with the approach that has consistently worked for several dogs, resulting in dogs that have been universally acknowledged as loving, happy, and well behaved.
The problem is that too many people see one tool that works for one dog and extrapolates that to all dogs. Prong collars are a valid tool for certain dogs in certain situations. Just because a prong collar works for a pit bull doesn’t mean it will work for a Jack Russel. Just because a particular harness works for a husky doesn’t mean it will work for a greyhound. Gentle Leader head harnesses work great for some dogs, but as SmartAleq described, some dogs will fight to the death to get them off.
The OP and his dog need to be evaluated in person first before just handing them any particular tool or method. But in general it’s better to start easy and work your way up to the “big guns” if needed.
That’s why I didn’t like the trainer he described. If a trainer automatically includes a tool in his training package, he’s a bad trainer. He can’t recommend the proper tool for the job until he evaluates the client. Also… a good trainer recognizes that in many situations he’s training the human more than the dog! (teaching the human how to properly handle the dog)
I agree with JcWoman, use positive reinforcement as much as possible … it might not be as quick or effective re-training Emma, but you’ll sleep better at night …
I recommend in the highest degree buying and reading one of the books by Winifred G. Strickland … although she writes towards training for competitive obedience, most of her ideas are completely valid for the dog-as-pet … and keep in mind Ms. Strickland advocates owner training as much as dog training, based on the theory that dogs always want to please their owners, and that owners need to learn how to show their pleasure to the dog …
Fortunately, Emma doesn’t pull the lead indoors, you can establish good behaviors and the reward this way … then take her outdoors and be very quick to reward her if and when she stops pulling … take a couple weeks off from your busy schedule and focus every minute on training Emma to not pull, she’ll get it by then and forevermore you’ll have an easy dog to take on walkies … as you said, she’s a wonderful companion, she deserves this time from you …
I was listening to an interview with a third generation Hollywood animal trainer … she said that for almost all these animals we see in the movies, the behaviors are elicited through food treats … the exception is dogs, they perform simply because they love the trainer, the dogs will do anything solely for a smile or a kind word … my dog would bolt towards me if I said the word “come” with every expectation I would fall to my knees and give him a great big hug … every time …
I think prong collars are cruel, and choking your dog with a choke chain is brutal … if we can’t get our dogs to obey with love, then we have a messed up dog … time to take that last trip to the vets and start over with a puppy …