What Are the Best Halters and Leashes for Walking Your Dog?
Learn whether you should use a halter and which leash is best for walking your dog.
Jolanta Benal, CPDT-KA, CBCC-KA
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What Are the Best Halters and Leashes for Walking Your Dog?
In last week’s article, I explained how to choose a collar or harness for training and walking your dog. This week, I’ll describe the pros and cons of a halter, or head collar. I’ll also help you decide what leash is best for you and your dog—the right one can make a big difference.
Should You Use a Halter to Walk Your Dog?
When halters first came on the market over 15 years ago, reward-based trainers were delighted, especially those who worked with reactive, aggressive, or just plain wild-and-crazy dogs. It was wonderful to have available a piece of equipment that gave guardians excellent physical control over their dogs without hurting or choking them.
Most Dogs Find Halters Unpleasant
But alas. It got obvious, pretty soon, that even though halters weren’t painful, a lot of dogs just hated wearing them. Dogs rolled on the ground and tried to rub them off, or they didn’t struggle but just plain looked unhappy and subdued. Some of us tried to tell ourselves the dogs only needed to learn the halter wouldn’t come off no matter how hard they tried, and then they’d, I don’t know, get over it. We also tried to tell ourselves those subdued dogs were actually just calm. There was a whole rap about how the halter’s action mimicked the control a mother dog exerts over a pup. Yeah, right. It was disappointing to have to admit that the new miracle device wasn’t the peach pie and ice cream we’d hoped for.
When Is a Halter the Right Tool?
Despite its flaws, we haven’t quite given up on halters. Because a halter enables you to control the movement of the dog’s head, and thus provides terrific leverage over the entire dog, it’s sometimes the safest choice. For instance, if you live in Manhattan and your very powerful dog lunges hard at every bike and skateboard going by, careful use of a head halter can prevent serious injury to both of you, possible bites, and possible euthanasia for your dog.
How to Teach Your Dog to Enjoy Wearing the Halter
If you need a halter to walk your dog safely, you can and should teach her that it’s pleasant to wear. We can’t get around the probability that a dog who lunges finds the halter’s pressure on his nose unpleasant, but at least we can do our best to make sure that the whole experience of wearing the halter in the first place isn’t one long misery. Many or most dogs can learn to accept the halter comfortably.
It would take another article to describe the process in detail, but the basic idea is to introduce the halter gradually and turn it into a predictor of wonderful things. You might start by just showing your dog the halter and then feeding him his breakfast, so the halter means yummy breakfast is on the way. Work up to having him wear the halter for meals and play.
What Should You Never Do When Your Dog Is Wearing a Halter?
Bear in mind that you should not be delivering sharp twists to your dog’s head and neck. I see many people give “corrections” with haltered dogs. Please don’t! If you’re using a halter for a lunging dog, never jerk the leash and never give your dog the whole length of a six-foot leash – with that much scope, she can leap like a trout on the line and hurt herself badly. Never, ever, ever use a halter with an extending leash.
How to Choose the Best Leash for Your Dog
After all that, the choice of leash is a pretty simple one. Your dog’s leash should be
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comfortable for you to hold,
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lightweight, and
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strong enough to hold your dog even if he bolts after a neighborhood cat or panics at the sound of an air brake.
You can buy two-foot, four-foot, five-foot, and six-foot leashes. Six feet is almost always the best choice; you can give your dog some room to move, and if you want him closer all you have to do is take up a foot or two of the leash.
What Kind of Leash Should You Get for Your Dog?
If you’re happy with a nylon leash, great, but don’t get a dollar-store special; the nylon itself may be just fine, but the hardware is likely to be rubbish. I find cotton more comfortable, but it doesn’t seem to wear well; plenty of people like hemp. Chain leashes weigh a ton and are completely pointless unless you need to show off how butch you are. Padded handles do nothing for me, but your mileage may vary.
I use a well-made but not expensive six-foot leather leash. I don’t buy many animal products; leather leashes are an exception. Once they’re broken in they’re super comfortable to hold, and a good one lasts for years. A vegan friend once told me that leather leashes were the only animal product that tempted her. If you knew her, this would tell you a lot about how comfortable they are.
Believe it or not, you might want to devote a minute to the clasp on your leash. Most leashes have snap clasps, the kind where you use a little knob to pull a bar closure out of the way so you can attach the leash to the collar. Others have lobster claw claspsopens IMAGE file . Some people find one kind of clasp much easier to use than the other, so experiment to see which you like better.
Should You Use a Waist Leash?
Waist leashes are underused. They’re just what they sound like—leashes that attach to a belt around your hips or waist. Try one if you jog with your dog, or if you’re clicker training and find it hard to juggle clicker, treats, and leash. They’re a good training tool for you if you grew up training your dog with “leash corrections” or just tend to yank reflexively on the leash. You can’t jerk a leash that you’re not holding in your hands.
Should You Use an Extending Leash With Your Dog?
As for extending leashes, many owners love them because they allow you to give your dog more range of movement while still, technically, having him on leash. But mention them to almost any trainer, me included, if you want to see her flinch. There are two main reasons. One, as your dog moves out, he keeps tension on the leash. Um, weren’t we trying to teach him not to pull?
Two, and this is the much more important reason, extending leashes are dangerous. Every trainer I know has had clients who dropped the handle, which then clattered along the sidewalk behind the dog, which panicked the dog, who bolted into traffic and nearly or actually got hit. Also, while admittedly most dogs more or less stick to the sidewalk, it can easily happen that a dog who’s out on 15 or 20 feet of cord spots a squirrel and veers sideways after it. You can substitute “cat,” “bicyclist,” or “skateboarder” for “squirrel” here. If you want to faceplant on the sidewalk, there’s your recipe. That is to say nothing of what happens to the startled biker or skater.
In a future article, I’ll explain how to safely use a long line—basically, a rope about 20 to 50 feet long—when you want to give your dog some room to move but she’s not quite ready to go off leash or when you’re not in a safe enough place. For other walks, though, stick with a regular leash.
Phew, that’s about it for halters and leashes. You can follow The Dog Trainer on Twitter, where I’m Dogalini, as well as on Facebook, and write to me at dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email. I welcome your comments and suggestions, and I may use them as the basis for future articles. Thank you for reading! Now go catch your dog doing something right.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Jolanta holds professional certifications in both training and behavior counseling and belongs to the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She also volunteered with Pet Help Partners, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that works to prevent pet relinquishment. Her approach is generally behaviorist (Pavlovian, Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian learning theory) with a big helping of ethology (animal behavior as observed in non-experimental settings).