July 27, 2004

• Love that Gentle Leader!

  Noticing my dog Koji’s head collar in the pics of our latest water run yesterday, leafylady asked if it is a Gentle Leader.

  Yesh!

  I first heard of head collars from animal behaviorist Trisha McConnell
  of public radio’s “Calling All Pets” program.  They are nifty
  things, designed to exploit the puppy’s natural go-limp response to
  being picked up by the scruff of the neck by his mother.  There’s
  a nerve plexus there that makes it very easy to control a pup and, to a
  lesser extent, a grown dog.

  When we took Koji to the vet for his puppy shots, we saw a display of
  Gentle Leader collars and bought his first one.  When he outgrew
  it, we got a bigger one.  Koji’s ancestors were sled dogs. 
  He has an urge to pull, and in a harness he can pull many times his own
  weight.  In a regular collar he will pull until he chokes himself,
  and can easily pull us off our feet.  With a dog such as this, a
  choke-chain collar is useless for control, and unnecessarily cruel.

  Koji is an excitable boy.  In the car we restrain him in the back
  seat with the seat belt looped through his regular red collar, to which
  we also hook his stationary chain when he’s outside alone.  He
  wears that red neck collar all the time, but only puts on the head
  collar for special occasions.  He does not like to wear the Gentle
  Leader, and as soon as we’re back from a walk he starts pawing at
  it.  But he loves putting it on because it means he gets to go out
  with us.  He stands up beside the hook by the door where it hangs,
  and sniffs at it, to let us know he wants to walk with us.

  The
  booklet that comes with the collars details how to persist with and
  insist on getting a pup accustomed to the head collar.  They’d
  rather be free, and their responses vary from acute whining distress to
  aggressive snarling resistance.   It took some months and
  much persistence on my part before he’d accept the Gentle Leader from
  Doug or Greyfox.  (I’m the alpha animal in this pack, would anyone
  have guessed? — Well, really, Granny Mousebreath, the Catriarch, is
  boss, but she doesn’t have opposable thumbs, so we have to put the
  collar on.)  The booklets also explain how best to use the collar
  to train puppies in basic commands such as “sit”, and to teach them
  quickly and silently to leave alone forbidden objects and stay out of
  taboo places.

  In addition to the booklets and a “drag line” the pups wear for remote
  control during training, each collar comes with a big round pin-on
  button that says, “No, it is not a muzzle!” for the primates to wear to
  fend off questions when they walk their dogs in public.  The dogs
  can eat, drink, pant and bark normally in their head collars. 
  They are just a great deal easier to control.  As our vet says,
  the closer to the head you get, the better you can control the dog.

  Beginning when I was eight years old, I’ve housebroken and given
  basic obedience training to dozens of dogs.   My techniques
  changed over the years as I read different training manuals and picked
  up more knowledge from hanging out with dogs.  No techniques I
  ever found worked as well and as quickly and easily for me, and as
  painlessly for the dogs, as this one.  This may read like a paid
  ad, but it’s just a heartfelt and glowing recommendation, given because
  I love dogs.  I have had my relationships with some of my dogs
  damaged by the training techniques I had been taught.  That hasn’t
  happened with Koji.
   

  • 8:14 pm
  • 5 Comments