Should Your Dog Walk Beside You or Is Walking Ahead Okay?

Walking ahead is fine, as long as the leash stays loose and he still responds to you. A formal heel is a skill you use in specific situations, not a standard for an entire thirty minute walk, and insisting on one is how a lot of people make walks miserable for both parties. The thing that actually matters is leash tension, not position.

This contradicts a fair amount of traditional advice, which holds that a dog in front is a dog leading you, and that leading you is a status problem. It is not. Dogs walk faster than us and they want to smell things. A dog three feet in front on a slack leash is not making a claim about the hierarchy.

What actually matters

1. The leash is loose. No tension, a visible curve in the line. This is the whole thing. A dog who is ahead but not pulling is walking politely.
2. He responds when you speak. Name, a change of direction, a stop. If he can do those, you have not lost anything.
3. He is not dragging you toward things. Ahead is fine. Towing is not, and the difference is obvious on your shoulder.
4. He checks in occasionally. A glance back every twenty or thirty seconds. That is the connection that makes position irrelevant.

Judge the walk on those four, not on where his shoulder is relative to your knee.

When you do want a formal heel

Heel is genuinely useful and worth teaching. It is a tool for moments, and those moments are usually short.

• Crossing a road. Six to ten steps of close position while you cross, then release.
• Passing another dog on a narrow sidewalk. Ten or fifteen steps with your body between them.
• Crowds, shops, and doorways. Anywhere he could get stepped on or tangled.
• Around anyone unsteady. Small children, elderly relatives, someone on crutches.
• When you need his attention. Heel is an attention position as much as a walking position.

Almost nobody needs more than about a minute of heel in a thirty minute walk. Teach it well, cue it when you need it, and release him the rest of the time.

Use a release word for the rest

This is the piece that makes the whole arrangement work, and most people skip it.

Have two modes and name them both. Heel means close and attentive. Something like go sniff or free means you may go ahead, sniff, and wander, on a loose leash.

Teach the release deliberately. Cue heel, six steps, then say the release word and let the leash out. Ten reps a walk. Within a fortnight he will start distinguishing them, and you get a dog who can do both rather than a dog who is always doing one.

The release is also your best real life reward. Ask for a few steps of loose leash, mark, then release to sniff. Sniffing is what he came outside for and it pays better than food on most walks.

The dominance argument, addressed

The claim is that the leader walks in front, so a dog in front is asserting himself. It comes from the same wolf pack model that gave us alpha rolls, and the researcher who popularized that model publicly retracted it. Wild wolf packs are family groups and there is no fixed marching order.

What is true is that pulling is self rewarding and gets worse with practice. That is a mechanical problem, not a status one, and the fix is that pulling never produces forward movement. Nothing about it requires your dog to stay behind your leg.

Also true is that some dogs do better with more structure. A high arousal dog who cannot settle on a walk often benefits from more heeling, not because of hierarchy, but because a job lowers arousal. That is a reason to use heel with that dog, not a rule for every dog.

Where I would insist on heel

Being fair to the other side, there are dogs where I want much more of it.

• Dogs strong enough to injure you. If a lunge could put you on the ground, position matters for safety rather than manners.
• Reactive dogs in tight spaces. You need him where you can manage him.
• Dogs in the middle of leash pulling rehab. More structure for a few weeks while the habit changes, then relax it.
• Anyone walking a dog who is not physically confident. A child, or a handler recovering from injury.

The walk I would aim for

Loose leash the whole time, dog mostly out in front sniffing, ten or fifteen check ins he offers without being asked, a few short stretches of heel at roads and passes, and one or two long sniff stops where he gets ninety seconds to work a patch of grass.

That is a dog who is easy to walk and a walk that is worth taking. Whether his nose is level with your knee for any of it does not come into it.

All of this rests on loose leash mechanics, which is the skill underneath both modes. My free loose leash blueprint has the progression and the rep counts. Download the Loose Leash blueprint

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Every drill in this article comes from the WorldWide K9 Academy course library. If you want the full step by step system, start with the $5 intro course.