Lots of exercise makes for a happy dog!

Starting a blog from scratch is a very daunting task. The first question is always: Where do I begin? I figured that I would start with a general overview of what I think is important when it comes to dogs and, surely, this has all been heard before. I’m, of course, going to give my own point of view of it, from a younger perspective which is sometimes grossly overlooked.



There are four extremely important things when it comes to dogs:

1. Exercise

2. Companionship

3. Rules

4. Rewards



Today, I will just cover the first one, exercise. This is an absolute given considering exercise is no doubt important for humans as well. From what I’ve come to notice, the healthier overall the human, the healthier overall the dog.

Anyway, exercise is important for dogs because it gets rid of their excess energy and it satisfies a basic need. Dogs are like ADHD (or ADD, whichever one it is now) children that can never take medicine. The only way to calm down that hyper active child is to give him as much exercise as possible – that’s the same thing with dogs. Now like I said, I have two small dogs and one large one. My small dogs get the same amout of walk time as the larger one – on a good day, 2 hours, on a bad day, it can just be a walk around the block. We have to be realistic here; we have lives and people just can’t set aside hours a day to walking dogs. The good part about that is dogs will mold to your schedule. The bad part about that is if your schedule isn’t good enough, you may have to edit it.

I’ll use my schedule as a prime example. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I am absolutely vacant the entire day except for 7-9 in which I tutor history on my college campus. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have class from 9-4 and the occasional extra class from 5-7. On Fridays, I have class from 8-2. On Saturdays and Sundays, I dedicate myself to completing homework, which lands me on campus a lot of the time. So, given that schedule, the best days to walk my dogs are: Monday, Wednesday, and the weekend sometimes. Now, what we’ve all been taught is that dogs MUST have a walk every. Single. Day. I can attest to this fact: If you give a dog adequate exercise, that must can be changed to “prefer”. I walk my dogs Monday, Wednesday, and either Saturday or Sunday for 1-2 hours (or 1-2 miles, depends on the activity level of the dog and my general mood). This walk combined with in-home play puts them in rest mode for the next day and sometimes the next few days.

Now, I said that having a dog in rest mode satisfies a basic need for the dog. It does; it satisfies the need to be on the move. Dogs are descendant from wolves, wolves are travelers because they follow their prey. Dogs are generally the same way, except they don’t usually have the freedom to travel like that, but we’ve all seen a stray dog and we have seen that dog piddle around all over the city looking for food. Our pets are no different. They have that innate drive to look and travel for food and we have to satisfy that to have happier, more relaxed dogs.



What is the benefit of a relaxed dog? Well, they’re more fun to be around, they’re less likely to chew up your best heels, cutest purse, or the drywall in your house. A relaxed dog is also far easier to train; they are less worried about expending energy and more worried about pleasing you – and that’s what we want.

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