Chima and the Harness Part One: Working Towards a Harness

So I know that I have told Chima's story a thousand times but for those of you who are new to my blog, Chima arrived at my home back in late May of 2013 and when she first got here she was semi-feral and was very uncomfortable being closer than 10 feet to a person unless she was able to sneak up from behind them.

At first we just ignored her and let her get used to us and our home. She had a couple weeks of getting in her "stealth" sniffs where she would sneak cautiously up behind us and give us a thorough sniff-down while we tried not to move as her cold wet nose took everything in.

Chima, on a long lead - a little stressed out when Troy looks at her when she is trying to sniff him

Soon she was okay approaching from the front if we didn't reach out for her. But we discovered she was quite sensitive to any touch, flinching and moving away from the slightest contact. I'll skip over all the work we did in between to desensitize and counter condition her to touch but I wanted to explain how things were in the beginning so I could make the point of what an obstacle this was to getting her to wear a harness. Not only did she dislike the feel of anything against her body, she also hated all the touch that would be involved in getting the harness on her.

The problem was, I do not believe in walking a small breed dog with a leash attached to a flat collar - especially a dog who is as prey motivated as Chima. What to do? I bought a ThunderLeash.

Diagram of how a ThunderLeash wrap works

Dog being walked with a ThunderLeash

While I still believe that the harness is the best option for your average dog, for skittish, touch sensitive dogs the ThunderLeash is an option that uses a leash wrap to create a makeshift harness without much manhandling. If you link to their website you will see how it works but I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS AS A NO PULL LEASH OPTION like they do. I believe there are much better options that do not put any pressure on the neck. I recommend it as a low touch, low handling harness option for skittish dogs.

So here we are almost 9 months later and Chima has never been presented with a harness or worn one. To her it is just a weird pile of webbing (that probably would be fun to chew on.) That is a great thing! She has never learned to dislike it because of negative experiences involving it. Come back for my next post on how I am working on teaching her that this pile of webbing is the most FABULOUS piece of dog equipment ever.