[Felix]

I never knew there were dog treadmills! I presume this is for fitness training?

I’m a runner so I run outside with my dog 8km (5 miles) 3x a week. Currently we run 2 minutes on, 1 minute walking, both for her and for myself as I’m a little injured. We cover the distance in around 50 minutes. Ultimately I want to get to about 12k (8 miles) more or less continuous, and it should take an hour.

[Felix]

Hi Simone,

Like you I have a young (almost 1 year) old dog and I enjoy walking her off-leash on the trails near where I live. Personally I like to let her roam about and she always follows me, never runs off and is generally very good (aside from a habit of trying to eat discarded chewing gum!)

The trails can be busy though and I wanted to be responsible, so I have spent a lot of time working on recall, including recall around other dogs. If we are coming up the trail and there is another dog on a leash, I will call Luna back to me and she has to sit or lay down – so there is no interaction with the other dog without permission. Generally if the other dog is leashed, we will just wait until they have gone past (or if necessary I will temporarily put Luna on the leash).

So that would be my advice – it takes work (we also use the remote collar) but this way we can safely walk the way we want to and also respect that not everyone wants their dog to interact with other dogs.

Cheers

[Felix]

Thanks Bill! This is helpful, much appreciated. Take your point entirely about standing still. I should say these days she is pretty good much of the time but still generally tries to take the lead. I have oscillated a bit back and forth with where I want her to be. I don’t really mind if she is ahead as long as she’s not pulling, and I note from Robert’s videos on focused heel that he doesn’t feel it’s fair to ask the dog to always be next to us unless they are doing that brief duration of focused heel, but then the flip side is it’s hard for her (or I guess any dog) to understand “you can be anywhere on the leash as long as you’re not pulling” and so it gets frustrating. Our other issue is her picking up stuff off the street (plant matter, twigs etc) and eating it, which I’ve been correcting for with the ecollar and it seems to be reducing.