after six years and five different pieces of equipment on our 78 pound boxer mix rooster i can finally walk him past the neighbors labradoodle without dislocating my shoulder, so here is the honest gadget ranking from worst to least worst, the two exercises that actually did the work when the gadgets finally stopped, the front clip harness sizing mistake that cost me an entire summer, and the specific week i realized we had been solving a strength problem with a training problem for five and a half years

Rooster is a 78 pound boxer mix, we think there is some kind of large working dog in there because he came out of the rescue at 55 pounds at 8 months and finished growing at 78 which surprised everyone including our vet. we adopted him at 8 months in july 2020, so we just crossed the six year mark, and the honest read on his loose leash walking is that we solved it in year six. six. i want to write out what the actual timeline looked like and rank the gear because every leash training thread on this forum has someone confidently recommending a piece of equipment that i personally spent 4 to 9 months on with a strong 70+ pound dog and can tell you exactly where it broke down. this post is not "how to train loose leash walking," there are 4000 versions of that written by better trainers than me. this post is what six years of doing that with a strong dog actually looked like, so anyone reading this with a 60+ pound puller can stop cycling through the same five pieces of equipment i cycled through.

the gear ranking, worst to least worst. one, the standard back clip harness we adopted him in. this is not a tool for a strong puller, this is a sled dog harness with the cute label sanded off, we spent 6 weeks in this and he was measurably worse at the end of it, and i realize now that the shape of a back clip harness on a pulling dog puts them in a mechanical position where their whole body weight is loaded into the shoulders and they discover they are actually a working animal, this was our first six weeks and easily the worst equipment decision. two, the gentle leader head halter. our first trainer put us in this at month 3 and we spent 4 months trying to make it work, Rooster hated it the way you hate wearing a snorkel to eat dinner, he would spin his head, paw at his face, and just refused to move forward for the first ten minutes of every walk. i now understand that some dogs adapt to head halters in about a week and some fight them for their entire life, and if you are in month two and its still a fight, you are in the second group, get out. three, the prong collar our second trainer talked us into at month 8. i want to be careful here because this is a whole topic and people have strong feelings, and my honest report is that it worked for about 11 weeks and then Rooster got desensitized to it and started pulling INTO the pressure, we ended up with a bigger prong, then a bigger one, and at that point our vet noticed thickening on his neck and told us to stop. i took the collar off in the parking lot of the vet clinic and threw it in the trash and cried in my car and this is not a metaphor. we spent month 11 through month 14 on prongs and if i could refund one purchase from the last six years it would be this one and it is not close. four, the sensation front clip harness at month 15, this actually helped a lot on day one and continued to help for months, and if i had had this at month 1 instead of month 15 i think the whole timeline is 18 months not 72. this is the piece of equipment i recommend to everyone in that "medium hard puller" category and it is the reason i keep going in this thread. five, the pinch collar version 2 that a different trainer tried to sell us at month 20, i want to name this as the point in the story where i finally started refusing training recommendations that had already failed under a different name and it is a shift i wish i had made three trainers earlier. the sensation harness stayed on him until year four when the actual training work started to hold on its own and now he walks in a flat collar with the harness in the backpack for backup.

the front clip harness sizing mistake that cost me an entire summer of month 15 through month 21. the sensation harness worked immediately on day one, then over the next two months it seemed to work less well, and by month 5 in the harness i was back to being dragged, and i had convinced myself the tool had stopped working when the actual problem was the harness had shifted position and was riding under his front legs like a swing seat instead of across his chest, because i had never actually resized it after his 8 pound growth spurt at 14 months. the y strap needs to sit across the sternum, not behind the front legs. i want to say that again because it is the single most useful sentence anyone said to me the entire six years. Y STRAP ACROSS THE STERNUM, NOT BEHIND THE FRONT LEGS. a properly fitted front clip harness on a 78 pound dog is a tool. an improperly fitted one is a sled. if your front clip stopped working in month 3, check the fit before you buy a new tool, and if you cannot fit two fingers flat under the chest strap and one finger flat under each shoulder strap with the y strap sitting an inch above the sternum notch, it is fitted wrong, and none of the training in the world is going to hold against a mis-fit tool on a strong dog. i went back to my current trainer sobbing in month 21 telling her the sensation had stopped working and she took one look at Rooster and said sit down and let me refit this and 10 minutes later i had a different dog on the walk home. if there is one useful thing in this whole post it is this paragraph, screenshot it if you have a big puller.

the two exercises that actually did the training work after 5 pieces of gear had done what gear can do. one, the two-step-and-stop exercise, done for 20 minutes a day for 4 months in year 2 and 3, and reintroduced any time we plateaued. very simple, walk two steps, stop, dog stops or gets a pop on the leash to bring him back into position, calm treat when hes standing next to me, then two more steps and repeat. we did this in the driveway, then the sidewalk in front of the house, then a quiet block, then a busier block, and it looked completely ridiculous to the neighbors for about six weeks. what it does is it teaches the dog that leash tension EQUALS THE WALK STOPPING, which is the entire lesson, and it teaches YOU the specific point at which your dog starts to accelerate ahead so you can intercept it before the pulling happens. this exercise does not look like a walk, it is not a walk, it is a training session that happens to move slightly forward, and if you try to convert it into a walk in week two you are undoing the whole thing. it took us four months and no dog on the internet took four months when we read about it but that is fine, our dog took four months. two, the pattern game "1-2-3 treat" from leslie mcdevitt, which is the exercise that got him past reactive triggers and past the neighbors labradoodle specifically. very simple, i count 1, 2, 3 out loud, and on 3 he gets a treat, over and over as we walk. it starts in the driveway with zero triggers and you build up to walking past a trigger while counting. the reason this works and other reactive protocols didnt for us is that it gives Rooster a JOB to do while the trigger is happening, which is listen for me to say 3 and be ready for a treat, and it turns out he cannot lunge at another dog and also count with me at the same time. this exercise is what took us from "cant walk on our own street" to "can walk anywhere except within 3 feet of an off leash dog running toward us."

the specific week i realized we had been solving a strength problem with a training problem, month 42, when my back went out from a bad lunge on a walk and i had to hire a walker for six weeks while i healed. our walker was a 5 foot 9 former olympic development track athlete, she weighed maybe 135 pounds, and rooster walked politely with her from day one, i thought she was performing miracles until she filmed a walk for me and i realized he was pulling exactly as hard as he pulled with me and she was just physically stronger than the pull. the training was working, we had done the training work. what had been failing was that i am 5 foot 4 and 130 pounds and i cannot physically overpower a 78 pound dog who wants to move forward, and no amount of training was going to change that basic physics. we solved the last 15 percent of the problem by me deliberately building up my grip strength and core strength over 8 months, working with a PT because at that point i was 45 and my body was not just going to do it, and by adding a hip belt to my leash that transfers the load off my shoulder and onto my whole body. i am posting this because nobody tells medium sized women with big dogs that we are also part of the equipment ranking, and that some of the pieces that fail to work for us are failing for a physics reason and not a training reason, and no trainer has ever mentioned this to me in six years and i think about that a lot. anyway. Rooster is 7, he walks politely on a flat collar or a well fitted front clip depending on the walk, we still do the 1-2-3 game past known triggers, and we crossed the neighbors labradoodle last thursday without either of us noticing until we were half a block past. if you are two years into this with a big dog, you are not doing it wrong, some of us take six.