Walking The Dog (Is Your Key To Choosing The Right One)

It’s amazing what you think of when you’re walking the dog. Walking the dog is ‘me time’. It’s thinking time, preparing for the day time and our fun together time.

So I’m wandering along walking the dogs, thinking about….walking the dogs! No seriously, there’s a point to this.

I’m out with my dogs 2-4 hours every day. I’m lucky in that I currently work from home doing my own website and some freelance work for Cambridge Health South Africa. (I write their newsletters and am expecting to also start managing their web content, plus hopefully some training next year!) But even when I was working full time my dogs got a minimum of 2 hours a day during the week and then 3-4 a day at weekends. Sometimes more!

It got me thinking…. exercise is the key to you choosing the right dog.

I see lots of dogs which just don’t get the exercise they need. About 5 doors down from me are two border collies who seem to spend all their time in the back garden. I have never, ever seen them being taken for a walk. Suffice to say the poor creatures go nuts whenever someone walks past the back gate – because they are BORED STUPID and have pent up energy which is never properly dealt with. And not only that, they have no mental stimulation at all either. That’s just plainly wrong for dogs which are supposed to be working to human command in the fields all day.

I think my dogs get more exercise in a week than these two get in a whole year.

This is important because there is no point getting a nice looking dog if it’s going to mangle your flowerbeds or chew your sofa to pieces when it doesn’t get walked enough.

So exercise is your key to choosing the right dog. Whether or not you have an allergy to dogs, you must start with a realistic idea of how much minimum time you have for walks each day. That means being really honest about the time – if it’s half an hour then say half an hour. If it’s 2 hours because you jog 8 miles a day then say that.

And I mean WALKS – not leaving a dog in the garden to do its own thing, but actually getting out there and getting some one-foot-in-ftont-of-the-other exercise!

The reason for this is that if your dog gets the exercise it needs, it will be happy with you, and the more likely you will be happy with it.

After you’ve filtered on exercise, then you can look at the other factors – town or country, indoor space , kids, relatives, garden, other pets, climate and so on. Because if you get exercise wrong, your dog will never be happy, no matter what else is right. All the behaviour books in the world won’t change a border collie from being the highest energy dog you can get into a couch potato. And all the behaviour books in the world won’t solve issues created by lack of exercise. You’ve seen the Dog Whisperer? How many times does he prescribe proper exercise as a cure for problem behaviours? Quite a lot!

So when you come to choosing your dog or puppy - the first one or the next in a long line – take a good LONG look at the length of your walks first.

P.S I love writing. It’s one thing I really excel at. So if you need some help with your newsletter, articles or web content (especially if its about dogs or weight management) get in touch.

http://howtochooseyourdog.com/2010/07/05/blog/walking-the-dog-is-your-key-to-choosing-the-right-one/