Hetty the very good girl

Hetty, our four-year-old cockapoo, is a very good girl. She is joyful and loving, with just the right amount of mischief. But one thing she has never been very good at is walking off the lead. Walking and playing off the lead is a life skill dogs are supposed to pick up as puppies.

We tried it with Hetty, but results were very mixed. She would see a bird and she would be off chasing it. If we were unlucky, she would disappear out of sight. It was scary and worrying. In the end, we concluded the best thing to do would be to keep her on the lead.

I did feel bad for her on my daily walks round the park, where 90% of dogs have the freedom to play off the lead. But I know how devastated we would all be if she got lost. Some other owners would be wary of her – because a dog on the lead tends to mean a dog which can’t be trusted around other dogs or people.

But Hetty just couldn’t be trusted to come back.

Sometimes at weekends, my husband and I would both take her to the park with a couple of balls and she would chase the balls off the lead and come back. But my husband is her absolute number 1 favourite person. She is far more likely to come back to him than me – although I have now been promoted to her second favourite person. (When she was little I was fifth on the list behind my husband, my two younger kids and my younger son’s girlfriend! All three of them are at university now and not around as much, so I’m finally her second favourite.)

We would usually let Hetty off the lead on the beach too, because there was generally three or four of us there to get her back if needed. But she would still chase birds and vanish into the distance.

A couple of months ago, we got invited to a ‘breed walk’ at the kennels she goes to. They hold these on Saturdays sometimes and this one was a poodle mix walk – everything from tiny maltipoos to huge golden doodles and a lot of cockapoos! We let Hetty off the lead to run around with the other dogs in this large, safe space. But we noticed she didn’t stray far from us and kept coming back.

We knew we had to build on this. Was Hetty finally grown up enough to be trusted off the lead?

We went to the park more with her off the lead – sometimes with no balls! She would run a little way and keep coming back to us. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to take her round the park off lead on my own. She was like a new dog.

On holiday in Padstow last month, she was unbelievable! It wasn’t warm enough to sit on the beach, but we had lots of walks along it with Hetty. Sometimes we threw balls for her and sometimes we didn’t. But every time, she ran a little way, then circled back to us. So we experimented with continuing to walk with her off the lead when we left the beach. She stayed off the lead along the little footpath from the beach, then the bigger footpath down into the town. We literally just put her lead on as got to the busiest bit of town.

I couldn’t believe she would do it. I kept feeling nervous and thinking we should put her lead back on. But she just kept going. Once she’d done it once, we were brave enough to do it again and again. We were in awe. Hetty really is a very good girl!

For anyone who doesn’t like dogs and is worried about dogs off leads, to reassure you, the beach and the paths from it were extremely quiet in early to mid-June. We wouldn’t have her off the lead if it was busy.