. . . in the distant, early morning . . .

Head halters and being dizzy…

I’m not a big fan of training collars: head halters, front-clip harnesses, prong collars, check chains, etc. etc.  I happen to own front-clip harnesses and head-halters, however, for a variety of reasons; starting with one really icy winter and a very rambunctious foster dog named Rusty.

My dogs are not perfectly leash trained.  Elka, despite over 2 years of consistent, high value, positive training, is still a really big pain in the arse on a leash.  Milton is much better, but I admittedly have not worked with him one-on-one as much as I should have.

Both of them still pull while on the front-clip Gentle Leader.  Not a lot, but when you’re dizzy already, “not a lot” is enough to destabilize you to the ground.

So tonight I fed Milton in a head-halter (Elka is already thus trained) and this evening we all went for a walk, both dogs in Gentle Leader head halters.

It was the most pleasant walk I’ve had with them since I got them.  They were both saintly after a few self-corrections which I barely felt.

Now, I will probably continue to use these so that we can have more pleasant walks.  I will continue also to train them to walk next to me on a normal collar, and will be working on the “silky fingers” technique to make them both much more responsive to neck pressure.  But that could take months, so during that time we’ll probably use the head halters.  Even though I am against them, it was that much more pleasant to walk with them on the dogs that I will use them.  The dogs don’t feel the head halter when behaving anyway.

But these are training collars and will be used as such. But between two dogs and major dizziness - well, the head halters let us go on a walk at all, so it was worth it.  They also didn’t seem to mind the head halters once they figured out how to not get the correction.

So, in short: I give up.  I surrender.  Head halters it is.

(Can you tell I feel a little bad about this?  But they work, so yea…)

-Lisa, on July 21, 2010 at 8:48 pm .::. Comment (0)