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The importance of dog walking
Most of us dog owners walk our dogs every day. We do it for obvious reasons—exercise, socializing, spending time with our dogs, making our dogs happy, etc. All good reasons, but in terms of dog psychology, what is the real purpose of the walk? It’s not for exercise, although exercise (for the dogs and us) is an incredibly beneficial side effect of walking, no doubt about it. However, the real purpose of the walk is…to look for food.
In the wild, when wolves and dogs wake up hungry in the morning, do they call room service? No, dogs and wolves are a traveling species; they walk to find food. The pack leader gets up and starts WALKING, and the rest of the pack follows. If they don’t walk, they don’t eat. So when we take our dogs for a walk, in our dog’s mind, we are looking for food.
Walking your dog properly is of primary importance in establishing yourself as the LEADER. Your dog learns to follow YOU, because YOU will provide food. Walking your dog properly means having your dog walk at your side or behind you, never out in front. (If your dog is walking out in front of you, who is the leader?)
When a pack of wolves catches and kills its prey, the leader of the pack eats first. The rest of the pack waits calmly at a respectful distance while the leader eats. When the leader finishes eating and walks away from the food, the pack members move in to eat. Thus, the order of walking and feeding our dogs should be: walk…rest…feed. By walking our dogs properly, letting them rest briefly and then eat, we are establishing in our dog’s psyche that WE are the leaders.
Dog whispering is about using dog psychology to establish the humans as the leaders, and the dogs as members of the pack. Why do we want this? Because this is how we create a calm, stable, well-behaved dog that is a joy to live with. Isn’t this why we got a dog in the first place?
DC Area Dog Whisperer
LeadYourPack.com
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