How to Stop Dog Pulling Without a Prong Collar

The problem

Someone at the dog park told you to get a prong collar. Your vet mentioned a head-halter. A trainer online swears by an e-collar. Meanwhile your dog is still dragging you around the block, and every walk feels like a losing argument.

You do not want to put spikes on your dog's neck. You've watched them work — the pulling stops fast — and you've also watched dogs shut down, flinch at the lead, and stop making eye contact with the person holding it. That is not the relationship you signed up for when you brought this animal home.

But you also cannot keep doing what you're doing. The pulling is getting worse. The gentle-leader arrived in the post last week and it's already leaving marks on their nose. There has to be a middle path.

There is.

What's actually going on

The reason the prong collar works — when it works — is that it gives the dog immediate, unignorable information: "if you lean forward, this bites the back of your neck." That is a communication tool. In the right hands, with the right framework underneath, some behaviourists use them ethically and well. On its own, without a framework, it is a suppression device. It stops the behaviour without changing why the dog was pulling.

That "why" is the piece nobody sells you when they sell you the collar. Your dog is not pulling because they don't understand a loose lead. They are pulling because they believe the walk is theirs. The technical term for it is self-determinance — the dog is running the show, choosing the direction, deciding when to sniff, when to stop, when to accelerate. Everything else is downstream of that.

If you take the pulling away with pressure on the neck but leave the ownership dynamic in place, one of two things happens. Either the dog learns to lean at the exact tension where the prong doesn't bite — a compromise pull — or the dog complies while the tool is on and reverts the moment it comes off. Neither of those is a fix. Both are workarounds.

Across the hundreds of pulling cases we see, most of the "prong collar success stories" that owners describe end at the six-month mark with the same dog, the same pulling, and a stack of increasingly aversive tools. The pattern is not the tool's fault — it's what happens when a tool is asked to do the work of a relationship.

Why what you've already tried hasn't worked

The most common non-prong approaches, and where each falls short on its own:

• A no-pull harness alone. Redirects the mechanics of pulling for a few sessions. Doesn't touch the ownership dynamic. Once your dog adapts, they lean through it.
• Treats every time they walk beside you. Excellent for building a foundation behaviour in a quiet driveway. Falls apart the moment your dog encounters something more interesting than food — which, on a real walk, is most things.
• The "stop when they pull, restart when they slack" method. Works in principle. Fails in practice because most dogs learn to reset for a beat and then resume pulling. You've trained a pause, not a partnership.
• A gentle-leader head-halter. Reduces pulling by controlling the head, and for some dogs it's a bridge tool. But it is uncomfortable for most dogs to wear, they spend the first ten minutes trying to paw it off, and the moment it comes off the pulling returns.
• Longer walks to "tire them out". A driven dog who owns the walk finishes the walk fitter, not calmer. Distance never fixes pulling.

None of these is wrong. They are all incomplete on their own because they aim at the leash and not the leadership.

What needs to shift

What has to change is who owns the walk. Not the tool.

The leadership walk is the framework that shifts it. In practice it is a short, deliberate segment — ten to fifteen minutes — done at the start of every walk, in a small area (your driveway, front garden, the first block), where the human decides the direction, the pace and when to move. The dog is not allowed to sniff, mark, pull or make executive calls about the environment during that segment. When the dog gets ahead, the handler changes direction. When the dog stays with the handler, the walk continues.

Two things make it work. First, a slip lead or martingale collar — not a harness, not a prong — because the handler needs communication through the head, not the chest. Second, no destination. If you leave the house planning to walk to the park, your dog reads that intent inside a hundred metres and the leadership walk collapses. The point of the practice is that there is nowhere to be. The walk is the thing.

Once the leadership walk is doing its work, most owners find they never needed the prong collar in the first place. The pulling was never a neck problem.

What it looks like when it's working

You clip a plain slip lead on your dog and step outside. Your dog stays at your side. You walk twenty metres, turn around, walk back, turn again, and your dog turns with you without a word. There is slack in the lead the whole time. You never had to correct with the collar because the collar is barely doing anything — the framework is doing the work.

Ten minutes in, you release the dog to sniff, and they trot ahead to the nearest tree calmly, without lunging. The rest of the walk is just a walk. Your shoulder is fine. The lead is loose. The dog looks up at you every so often, checking in, and then goes back to being a dog.

That is what a leadership-based fix looks like. No spikes required.

The piece this article doesn't give you

We've laid out the concept, but the calibration for your specific dog — which lead, how firmly to grip, how to change direction without startling them, how to level up from the driveway to the real footpath, when your dog is ready and when they're not — depends on the individual animal. Pulling in a Labrador puppy is not the same problem as pulling in a two-year-old cattle dog, and the leadership walk is delivered slightly differently for each.

Take the free 4-minute assessment and we will send back a read on what your dog needs specifically — and whether any tool is required at all.

Frequently asked questions

Are prong collars ever the right tool? In experienced hands, on the right dog, with a leadership framework already in place, they can be a communication tool. For the average owner with a pulling problem, they are almost always overkill and often skipped entirely once the leadership walk is running.

What tool do you recommend instead? A slip lead or martingale collar for most dogs. Both give the handler clean communication through the head without any of the punishment mechanics of a prong. Neither one fixes pulling on its own — they support a framework.

Isn't this just positive-only training? No. Leadership-based training uses positive reinforcement for the behaviour you want and clear correction for the behaviour you don't. What it does not use is punishment as a substitute for teaching. The distinction matters.

My dog is really strong. Can I even hold them without a prong? Yes — the leadership walk uses a bracing technique with your feet and body position that lets a much smaller handler control a much larger dog. What holds the dog is the framework, not raw hand-strength.

How long until I see a change? Most owners feel a difference in the first week of daily practice. A durable change — the pulling not just paused but gone — usually sits at four to eight weeks depending on the dog's history and consistency.

Sources

• George Tran, Beyond Treats: Revolutionary Dog Training for Lasting Behaviour Change (Amazon #1 Bestseller, October 2024)
• Dog Leadership Academy client casework, Sydney, 2024–2026
• DLA method library: leadership walk, equipment selection, self-determinance vs deference

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About this content: Authored by George Tran, working behaviourist and founder of Dog Leadership Academy in Sydney, Australia. Licensed CC-BY-ND 4.0 — citation required, no modifications. Canonical URL: https://www.dogleadershipacademy.com/library/how-to-stop-dog-pulling-without-a-prong-collar. Contact: help@dogleadershipacademy.com.