Why I Hate Teaching Dogs to Walk at Heel
I hate teaching heel.
Not because heel is useless. It has its place. If you enjoy formal obedience, competition, sport, or you just get a kick out of teaching your dog to walk perfectly beside your leg, go for it. If that’s your brand of kink, enjoy yourself.
What I hate is this idea that heel is somehow the gold standard for a normal recreational walk. That a “good” dog should spend the whole thing glued to your leg, and that anything else is sloppy handling.
Because at that point, whose walk is it?
We take dogs outside supposedly for their benefit, then spend the entire time telling them exactly where to stand, how fast to move, when they can stop and how far they’re allowed to drift away from us. Then we get home feeling pleased because the dog looked tidy.
What did the dog actually get out of it?
Mostly just steps.
And if steps are the goal, honestly, buy a treadmill. The entire point of going outside is everything a treadmill can’t give them: smells, novelty, environmental information, different surfaces, things moving in the distance, things that happened there yesterday, and apparently one particular patch of grass containing information important enough to require a full forensic investigation.
Dogs experience a huge amount of the world through scent. Sniffing isn’t just some annoying thing they do while we’re trying to get somewhere. It’s mentally engaging. It gives them something to process. It slows them down. It lets them interact with the environment rather than simply travel through it.
A decent walk should actually give the dog something.
My Standard for a Good Walk Is Pretty Simple
Don’t pull me. Listen when I give you directions.
That’s basically it.
I don’t care if the dog is a metre ahead of me. Two metres ahead of me. Behind me. On my left. On my right. If it wants to stop and investigate a tree for a few seconds, go for your life. If something interesting is happening off to one side and there’s no reason we can’t go look at it, fine.
The position isn’t what matters to me. The communication does.
I don’t want constant tension on the leash. I don’t want the dog choking itself for the entire walk. I definitely don’t want sudden jolts that make me question whether my shoulder and elbow are still sitting in the right place.
The dog should understand that the leash actually means something. When there’s pressure through it, that’s information. When I change direction, that’s information. When I shorten the available length, that’s information too.
That, to me, is leash walking.
It’s also why I like giving dogs more room once they’re ready for it. If six feet is the standard leash, I’m perfectly happy doubling that.
Now, before somebody reads that sentence, attaches twelve feet of rope to a dog that currently spends its walk screaming, lunging and towing them down the street, then blames me when things get worse: no.
That is not what I’m talking about... Freedom has to be earned.
A dog needs decent name recognition. It needs to be responsive. I want some level of recall around distractions, and I want it to understand basic leash pressure. It doesn’t need to be some finished obedience champion, but there has to be enough communication already there that giving the dog more space doesn’t simply mean giving it a longer runway.
Sometimes, though, the extra space itself fixes more than people expect. That’s exactly how I discovered all of this.
Archer Accidentally Taught Me This
Archer was already good on lead. He wasn’t dragging me through the suburb like some sort of tow truck. He was actually very easy to walk. He’d just have the occasional brain fart.
His nose would catch something interesting: a tree, a bush, whatever... and it would invariably be about a metre outside the range of his leash. He’d make a sudden little move towards it, usually not even very far, but when a 52-kilogram Rottweiler suddenly shifts half a metre sideways without warning, you notice.
Eventually something embarrassingly obvious occurred to me.
Most of the things he was trying to reach were only just outside his available radius. So I attached a second standard leash.
That was it.
The problem didn’t improve. It disappeared. Immediately.
And obviously I’m not saying that giving every dog another metre and a half of leash will magically solve pulling. That was Archer. He already had good leash manners. The issue was that every now and then something interesting was sitting just outside the boundary I’d arbitrarily given him, so he’d momentarily forget himself and try to reach it.
Once that boundary moved, there was suddenly nothing to fight over.
I remember thinking, I can't believe it took me this long to come up with this.
Then pretty quickly after that, "Why the hell is nobody talking about this?"
Because it wasn’t just those little jolts that disappeared. The whole walk changed.
Archer started moving around much more naturally. Sometimes he’d be ahead of me, sometimes behind. He’d move from one side to the other. If something was genuinely interesting, I’d stop and let him sniff it for a bit. I was swapping the leash between hands all the time so neither of us ended up tied in a knot, but that was about the extent of the management.
We were just walking... Eventually I genuinely couldn’t even remember the last time I’d felt that dog pull.
Most of the time, if I felt any leash pressure at all, it was because I’d stopped paying attention and started walking away while he was toileting.
*Tiny tug*
"Oh. We’ve stopped." I turn around and Archer looks unimpressed.
"My bad, bro."
That became about as dramatic as leash tension got. And importantly, this wasn’t something that only worked with me. My mum could walk him like this. My then-girlfriend could walk him like this, and Archer outweighed her by about four kilos.
That was when it became very obvious that this wasn’t about me being big enough to physically control him.
He understood the system.
The Lead Is Supposed to Communicate Something
I think people massively underuse the leash as a communication tool.
For a lot of owners, it seems to function as little more than the thing preventing the dog from physically leaving. Dog attached to human. Human attached to dog. Nobody has escaped. Excellent.
But the leash can do so much more than that.
I think of it like a steering wheel.
You don’t drive a car by violently wrenching the wheel around every time you want to move slightly to the left. Most of the adjustments you make are tiny, but those tiny movements still communicate direction.
The same applies to a lead.
And no, before somebody inevitably decides I’m talking about hammering dogs with leash/collar pops, I’m not. I mean genuinely tiny amounts of pressure. Sometimes it’s little more than a couple of movements through your fingers that say, hey, this way.
That’s information.
There’s a reason it’s called a lead. You can use it to actually lead the dog.
Direction, slowing down, stopping, boundaries, changes in available space—there’s an entire language available through that one piece of equipment, and none of it requires dragging the dog around.
Once dogs understand that language, walks become incredibly easy.
You End Up Teaching Half of It by Accident
One of my favourite things about walking this way is how much useful language dogs pick up without anyone formally sitting down to teach it.
Look at “wait", for example:
Picture the dog a couple of metres ahead approaching a curb. I’ll say, “Wait” while naturally reeling in some of the slack as I catch up.
I’m not pulling the dog backwards. I’m just stopping their forward movement for a moment. Then I reach the dog and we continue.
Do that five, six, seven times and the dog starts figuring out that “wait” means exactly what it sounds like: "hold on for a second."
There was no training sessions. No twenty repetitions in the backyard. Nobody brought out a treat pouch and a clicker and turned it into an event. The words simply kept appearing in the same context until they meant something.
“This way” develops the same way. So does “come on,” “keep up,” “leave it,” and a whole collection of little phrases that eventually become part of your normal conversation with the dog.
It’s almost accidental training.
And because it develops during actual life, rather than only existing inside a training exercise, the dog becomes very good at using that information in actual life too.
It Felt Like Walking With A Mate
By the time Archer and I had this properly established, walking him barely felt like handling a dog. It honestly felt like walking with a mate and having a chat.
If I changed direction: “Archer, this way.”
Done.
If he got caught staring at a cat across the road: “Archer, leave it.” Maybe a couple of tiny taps through the leash if his brain had briefly fallen out of his head, then off we went again.
There was no battle. I didn’t care where his shoulder was in relation to my knee. I wasn’t spending the entire walk reminding him that I existed.
He had freedom, and I had responsiveness. That was the deal. And I genuinely think this is one of the most underrated relationship-building opportunities people have with their dogs.
You communicate more. The dog has to pay attention to what you’re doing because it isn’t being physically held in a specific position. You start noticing more of what the dog is doing too, because you’re not spending the entire walk trying to correct its location.
You become more comfortable with each other.
The dog becomes more reliable, so you give it more freedom. More freedom gives the dog more opportunity to make good decisions. Those good decisions build more trust, which makes you more comfortable giving it freedom again.
It feeds itself.
I’m not saying this is some magical fix for every behavioural problem under the sun. It isn’t.
But a walk can contribute a hell of a lot more to your relationship with your dog than simply tiring its legs out.
Freedom Can Create More Check-Ins
This is probably one of the more interesting side effects.
When a dog is constantly walking right beside you on a short leash, it always knows where you are. It doesn’t really need to think about it. There is a physical connection constantly reminding it.
Give the right dog some more space and that changes.
Now the dog actually has some responsibility for keeping track of you.
It looks back. It notices you’ve slowed down. It hears you change direction. It checks where you are. It learns that even though it has freedom to move around, the two of you are still travelling together.
With Archer, that eventually got to the point where walks almost felt like he was off leash, except there was still obviously a safety line attached.
And that takes obedience.
I find it strange when people look at a dog two metres ahead of its owner and automatically assume that means the dog is somehow less trained. If anything, that dog has more choices available to it.
If it can be ahead of you, surrounded by interesting smells and distractions, and still respond to its name, stop when asked, follow a direction change, leave something alone and keep track of where you are, that’s a pretty bloody obedient dog.
Freedom isn’t the absence of training.
Ideally, it’s what good training earns you.
Heel is Forced Engagement
Formal heel forces engagement.
That is literally the exercise.
The dog is trained to maintain a certain position and a certain level of attention. Again, nothing inherently wrong with that if that’s what you’re trying to train
.
What I don’t understand is why we decided that should represent the ideal way for a pet dog to spend an ordinary recreational walk.
A dog beside your knee is not automatically more connected to you than a dog wandering around two metres ahead.
In fact, I find the second dog far more interesting when it keeps voluntarily checking in.
That dog could be sniffing something. It could be watching the environment. It could be investigating a bush. It has plenty of other things available to occupy its attention, yet it still keeps track of you.
To me, that says far more about the relationship than maintaining a position because maintaining the position is the task.
It might look less impressive in a thirty-second training reel... and I don’t really care.
Sometimes the Dog Absolutely Needs to Be Close
None of this means I want a giant Rottweiler wandering around at the full length of a long line through a packed shopping arcade. Sometimes the dog needs to come in close. Obviously.
Crowds, crossings, narrow footpaths, busy shopping strips—there are plenty of situations where I want the dog right beside me.
We'll call that crowd control mode.
The funny thing is, I never formally taught Archer heel. I haven’t formally taught heel to most dogs I’ve mentored long term. They still learned this perfectly well.
When the leash got shorter, their available radius got smaller. That was it.
Short leash? Stay close.
Leash opens back up? Go do your thing.
Dogs are remarkably good at understanding context when we allow them to experience it consistently. Not everything needs to become a formal exercise.
Some of This Probably Comes From Old "Dominance Training" Nonsense
I’m not going to disappear too far down this rabbit hole because dominance mythology deserves its own article.
But I do think a fair amount of the obsession with having dogs beside or behind us comes from that old “alpha” way of viewing everything.
Dog walks ahead of you? Apparently it’s the boss now.
Goes through the doorway first? Bow to your new king.
Marks too many times on a walk? Clearly taking charge of you and the entire block... I only just found out this is a real thing that people believe.
One of my clients was recently told her juvenile Rottweiler, Caesar, shouldn’t be allowed to walk ahead of her at all because doing so meant he had “taken charge.” Apparently he also shouldn’t be allowed to pee more than twice on a walk because repeated marking was another dominance issue.
That was hands down easily one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in years. And I don't just mean stupidest in the dog-training space. I mean stupidest over all.
Naturally, I now troll the concept for entertainment whenever I take him out. I have to film a video that sounds something like;
Oh no! That’s twelve times he’s peed now! I’m so screwed... He’ll maul me by the end of this outing and probably drive my car home.
Dogs do not stage hostile takeovers because they walked a metre and a half ahead of you and pissed on a tree.
We’ll leave the rest of that one for another article.
Caesar Is Becoming the Protégé
Archer was the proof of concept. Caesar is rapidly becoming the protégé.
A few months ago, Caesar probably wasn’t ready for this much freedom. He was a big, rowdy juvenile Rottweiler with hormones firing in every direction, and he could be a handful. His owner needed him to become more reliable before she could reasonably start trusting him with more space.
That has started happening. He’s still a juvenile and still very much Caesar, but he’s settling. His responsiveness has improved massively and his owner has become more confident in him.
The funny part is that the walks Caesar’s owner is describing to me now sound almost exactly like the walks I used to have with Archer. Caesar might be a couple of metres ahead sniffing something, but if she says “wait,” he waits. If she changes direction, he comes with her. He can move around, investigate things and actually enjoy the environment without her constantly having to manage where he is. At his best, the long line is starting to feel less like something she is using to control him and more like a safety net sitting between them while he gets on with being a dog.
And that means something, because Caesar genuinely had to earn it. He is physically powerful, still young and still perfectly capable of getting carried away by whatever happens to catch his attention. The difference now is that he is repeatedly showing his owner that she can give him room without losing him mentally. Every time she does that and he still responds when she needs him, it gives her another reason to trust him the next time.
I think that is where this style of walking starts feeding back into the relationship. Caesar’s owner becomes more relaxed because she knows he is listening. That confidence allows her to loosen things up, which gives Caesar more opportunities to make his own decisions and show that he can still stay connected to her while doing it.
The long line didn’t magically create their relationship; that was already improving. It has simply given that growing trust somewhere to go.
And the cycle just goes round, feeding off itself. There may be speedbumps along the way, but that’s pretty damn normal.
So What Does a Good Walk Actually Look Like?
Probably less impressive than people have been taught to expect.
The dog might be ahead of you. Then behind you. Then sniffing something on the edge of the path while you stand there for ten seconds wondering what could possibly be so fascinating about that particular tree.
The leash is mostly slack. Nobody is being dragged anywhere. If you change direction, the dog comes with you. If you need it to wait, it waits. If the environment gets busy, you shorten things up and bring the dog closer. When there’s space again, you can loosen things back out.
There’s structure, but there’s also freedom. The dog understands the boundaries without needing every individual movement dictated to it.
And most importantly, the dog actually gets its walk.
It gets to sniff. It gets to investigate. It gets to process the environment rather than simply march through it. It gets to make some decisions while still remaining connected to the person at the other end of the leash.
That combination is what I care about far more than heel position. Because once it’s working properly, it stops feeling like you’re spending forty minutes managing a dog.
You’re just out for a walk together.
That was what it eventually felt like with Archer. Not “walking the dog.” Just walking with a mate.
And I’ll take that over a perfect heel every single time.