a little help needed please

[crause]

I am switching over to Gimp from another edit program and could use a little help. I take photographs of rescue dogs to post onto adoption websites, mostly for Labs4rescue. The main thing I do is to remove the leashes from the photo and do a little cropping. I can't figure out how to do that on this program. I can not access the user manual it says that something crashed and to restart my computer. That didn't help. In the previous program I used, I would put the cursor on an area that I wanted to copy and then use the brush to cover over the leash. This worked great. Can anyone teach me how to do this on Gimp?
I thank you and all of the dogs looking for forever homes thank you.

[Blighty]

Use the Clone Tool
1. Select the Clone Tool
2. Select an appropriate brush, probably the circle hardness 0.75. Set the brush size
3. Ctrl-click to set the source area
4. Drag over the leash

For help, Shift-F1 produces a cursor with a question mark. Then click on the Clone Tool.

Once you get the more familiar with Gimp there is the Resynthesizer plug-in that can make the job easier. Ask again when you feel that you are ready to move to the next step.

[Ofnuts]

In addition to Blighty's answer, the Clone tool is described here: https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-clone.html