How many health habits — physical, spiritual, emotional — have I promised myself I would stick to every day? Pushups and neck stretching, journal writing and meditation: They feel good when you do them, but time gets away from me, and then I forget until the next good intention comes along.
Not so with dog walks. Ever since my family rescued our first dog (the late, great Skip) in 2000, followed by sweet Lucy in 2003, I have dog walked every morning — sick or healthy — without fail, unless I am out of town. When people ask how often I walk my household’s current dogs, Mia and Gabby, I can honestly tell them: “Every day, any weather.”
A recent article in the Washington Post, reprinted in my local newspaper, urged readers not to “skip your dog’s walk” or assume that letting them out in a fenced backyard would suffice. The reasoning shows the human benefits of dog walks, too.
- Dogs need exercise and don’t pursue it on their own.
- They need the mental stimulation of seeing — and smelling, always smelling — new things.
- And they need “human interaction,” which I would reframe as bonding. You develop a relationship with your dogs when you’re outside together every day.
Though I don’t always want to leave my house early in the morning, I am always glad I did once I get out there. Putting my feet on the street and my face in fresh air is as good for my mental health as it is for theirs. Once Gabby does her down-dog stretches, or I see light softening the sky, we suit up and show up. It’s time to go.
The walks go better when I stay calm.
I like to stride when I walk: head up, glutes pumping, spine long and straight. At 66, I am grateful to be able to move so fluidly. Striding uninterrupted rarely works with leashed dogs, however. “Guardians need to take the animals’ lead,” says the dog-walking article, rather than dragging our pets along on our fast-paced walks or runs or on a bike ride — I shudder whenever I see it — with a leashed dog straining to keep pace.
“If your dog wants to sniff every blade of grass, then that’s what they want to do on their walk,” says a dog-training advocate quoted in the Washington Post piece, which, tellingly, never uses the term dog “owner.” My morning dog walks are for Mia and Gabby, not for me. If I want pure exercise, I can schedule that for another time.
Sometimes I imagine the dog walks as a metaphor for life. When the girls pull on their expandable leashes or go off in different directions, forcing me to pirouette in the middle of the sidewalk to keep us all from getting tangled, I liken the aggravation to the pressures I navigate each day. Whether it’s a project that has hit a roadblock, or an imagined slight from a friend, or my perpetually overbooked calendar — it will all smooth out eventually if I respond more than react.
So it is with my willful, unruly dogs. Praise and positive reinforcement, as well as a few consistent commands (“too icy” during the winter, when an unplowed alley looks unsafe), go much further than yelling at them or letting myself get exasperated. I can breathe deeply and watch the sunrise, or admire an artful garden, or look in a shop window while the dogs scratch and sniff. That makes the walk more interesting for them and much more pleasant for me.
My husband loves the New Yorker cartoon that shows a mid-sized dog on a leash with a thought bubble: “Always good dog, never great dog.” Our dogs are great. It’s hard to overstate how much they mean to me. If I praise Mia for listening rather than yelling at her for stopping at every tree, if I kneel and stroke Gabby’s chest while she squirms at a long red light, if I let them visit their regular haunts in our neighborhood — the yard with food scraps outside the fence, the husky with the blue eyes who never barks — then I am allowing them some agency, acknowledging their intelligence.
It isn’t always my agenda; that practice serves me in relationships with humans, too.
Sometimes, the dogs see a cat.
Our neighbor, Tim, walks his cat around the block once a day on a thin nylon rope, and Gabby, especially, goes manic behind the fence that surrounds our backyard. Installed by the previous homeowners, the wrought-iron fence allows her to see who is walking along the side street of our corner property — which, in my view (not to mention the dog’s), is critical.
I feel for the dogs behind those tall, wooden privacy fences who can hear and smell other animals but can’t see them. They paw frantically at the ground, and stick their snouts beneath the gate, baring their teeth but mainly wanting to engage. Which is what I long to tell the owners when they open the back door to yell at the dog for being just that. A dog.
We see the occasional roaming cat on our morning walks. Mia and Gabby bark and lunge while the cat hisses and arches its back, calling to mind the phrase “fighting like cats and dogs.” Rabbits are prey, not to taunt but to kill. Gabby goes into hunting pose, keenly alert, her tail straight up in the air, when she sees a rabbit freeze in self-defense. Her jaw opens and closes as if preparing to chomp down fast. It’s pure instinct on display.
A rez dog whose relatives still hunt for most meals, Gabby has killed rabbits in our backyard. She’s even ferreted out a few bunnies in alley bushes on our morning walks, carrying the poor things home squirming or flopped dead between those warmed-up jaws.
We saw a coyote one summer morning, standing in the middle of the street. At first, I thought it was a long-legged, shaggy dog without a leash. But it looked too wary and thin to be domesticated, and the coyote lost interest in making a meal out of my smaller dog, Mia, once it saw me. Instead, it turned and trotted toward the river while I calculated how many busy roads it had to cross.
The beauty and rhythms of nature remain evident, even in the city, if you take the time to notice — contemplating the outsized impact we humans have had on the planet, as though we owned it, holding back leashed dogs that yearn to run.
The Middle Stages: Between Midlife and Old Age 