I think it rather depends on what you want - If we're out for a stroll and Humphrey has to be on the lead, I wouldn't think it necessary, or fair, to expect him to stay glued to my heel - I'm quite happy for him to trot along infront - we call this "walk nicely Humphrey!"
, as long as he doesn't yank me all over the place. For me, "Heel" is literally just that, and I (try
to ) impose that if we're passing other dogs, joggers, traffic etc and I wouldn't expect him to do it for too long. I do use the heel command (in our case, its Fuß
) but I try not to use a command at all for loose walking as I think "Fuß" would lose its meaning if I used it all the time and didn't insist on the correct position - hope that makes sense?
I make this sound as if we've got it all in place already 😂, we're a long way from consistency, once his initial excitement about going out has eased, he's pretty good - return journey's rarely a problem but he still gets very easily distracted - its easier to get him to sit and let the distraction pass than walk past the distraction ourselves.
I try not to set my goals too high and while I do try to train good lead discipline all the time we're out, I'm under no illusions that we'll probably never be perfect - and that's ok. On the upside, a deer jumped out about 20 yards from us this morning, I yelled "stay" and he stopped dead and came back when called, so hey ho - can't have everything. Wouldn't guarantee he'd do the same tomorrow but that's the excitement of living with a cocker, its like Russian Roulette!!!