I dont have a major issue with them, we used one with my old boy and never had a problem. But now im not so keen after a dog snapped his to get at jake. He chased jake and grabbed his back leg. Luckily, I managed to pick him up before any further damage was done. Also, I once walked past a dog on one and I assumed it was locked so proceeded to pass. The dog lunged at jake, and tried to bite him but thankfully missed. The owners response was, 'sorry, shes not mine, shes a friends' .

dont like them being used near roads at all, i have had at least 9 dogs run out across the road in front of my car because owners dont have them on the brake or the brake failed thats happened 3 times!! what flexi dont tell you is that the flexi lead should be replaced at least every 8 months!!!!!!!!!!! was shocked to find that out, i know people whove had the same one for years!!!!!

i like flexi's for training recall etc but would never ever ever go near the corded ones (they just look like they would snap way too easily) always tape, i had one for ty when he was younger and it lasted me a few years. i now use a halti training lead on ty.

i didnt realise that they needed to be replaced so often

I love them. I walk my dog almost solely on a flexi lead. She can be off leash with no problem, but many of our walks are on sidewalks near the road and we do have leash laws (that I don't always obey, but I do near roads for safety reasons). I know I know..."near the road wtf omg ur a bad owner oh noes!!!!!!11" lol The flexi allows my dog to stop and sniff the grass or the trees or the bushes near the sidewalk without my having to walk off the sidewalk myself.

Yes the road is closer than the end of the flexi but (a) my dog has no interest in going out into the road unless we're going to cross it and (b) I have an itchy trigger finger and if she gets too close to the road I lock the flexi down.

I also only use the real Flexis and not a knock-off. I use a tape one, not the corded ones as I think they're sturdier. And I use the proper one for a dog of her size. I also prefer the shorter ones (mine is 16 feet) over the super long 20+ feet ones I've seen. If she can get 20 feet away from me safely, I might as well just let her off leash!

I did have one "break" on me. The retracting mechanism just stopped working so I ended up having a 12 foot leash on a handle. LOL It was a pain to walk with the leash like that (it happened toward the end of a walk -- I think it got wet and maybe rusted, damned snow!) but it wasn't a big deal. I've never had one snap, not even when 52 pounds of dog hit the end hard.

I think hate is a strong word... I wouldn`t use one because you have no control, because you can`t train your dog with one and because I believe it trains the dog to pull.
I find the majority of other people using them are doing so because their dog is untrained.
There are a few cases when using a flexi is a good thing, I admit. For new dogs, for dogs with dementia and for dogs with problems.
But I don`t beleive that 99% of all the dogs I see being towed round the Country Park on their bits of string are untrainable or sick.

That's your opinion, not fact. I did an awful lot of my girl's training on a flexi. I've used it to train her not to pull. She was never a super puller, but she did pull at the end of the leash. Now she respects the length of the leash and won't try to pull beyond it. If she starts to move faster and feels the tension (on any leash, she does this on short leashes now too), she slows up. They're great for the early part of recall training and wait/stay training. I would have her sit and wait, then walk out to the end of the leash and release her to come to me. Once she could successfully stay at the end of a 12 foot leash, I moved onto doing it off leash. For recall work, I'd let her wander around on the end of the leash, then call her to me.

I also trained her out of her reactivity on the leash. When I see another dog, I release ALL tension on the leash. There's usually a little bit of tension on the collar with a flexi, so I lock it down at about 3 feet and allow it to dangle. No tension now. So she sees the other dog, feels no tension on the leash from me, and I tell her a slow, calm quiet voice "relax." And she does.

I didn't like a 6 foot leash for training her out of reactivity. It's too long for that and I'd have a dog bouncing around at the end of a 6 foot leash. The times I tried to keep her closer by gripping the leash further down I got some pretty bad rope burns and cuts on my hands. I'd have to have a 3 foot leash to comfortably work on reactivity training. Since I don't want to walk her on such a short leash, it wouldn't work. Change leashes every time I see a dog coming? Not gonna happen. But with a flexi, I can have her at 3 feet easily. There's much more control with how far or how close you keep the dog. I can lock it down at 2 feet or let her go out to 12. I don't have those choices with a fixed length leash.

No leash "trains a dog to pull" (and if anything did, I would think a harness would). That happens because the person at the other end of the leash doesn't train the dog NOT to pull. A dog on a flexi is no more or less likely to pull than a dog on a fixed length leash. It all depends on the person using that leash.

You may have your opinions, but they're not entirely rooted in reality. You CAN train using a flexi (and in fact our first trainer spoke some about flexi training, as she knows many people use them). Some people just don't bother. Those same people aren't going to train if they use a fixed length leash either.

How do you teach loose lead walking?

Well, you can easily lock it down if you wish to train loose lead walking similar to a fixed length leash. We didn't do that though. With Dahlia, I trained her not to pull the same way most people I know do: be a tree. She gets to the end, I stop. She moves back toward me, we continue on. She pulls again, same thing. Now she never pulls.

The tension on the flexi is really not that strong (I had a knock off that was MUCH stronger and I didn't care for that one as much). It's not as tensionsless as a fixed length leash, but it's light enough that she recognizes it as "loose" because she never pulls on a fixed length leash either and I really did almost no training on her 6 foot leash.