Walking the Dog Day

What the day is

Walking the Dog Day is observed on February 22. Most owners walk their dog daily, so the useful question is not whether but how.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. What has changed is the understanding of what the walk is for.

A dog's primary sense is smell, by a margin that is hard to convey. The olfactory apparatus is vastly more developed than a human's, and a dog reading a patch of grass is gathering information about which animals passed, when, and in what condition. A walk conducted at human pace with the dog pulled along behind is, from the dog's side, a journey with the interesting parts skipped.

Trainers and behaviorists increasingly recommend the opposite: a shorter route with time allowed for sniffing, sometimes called a decompression or sniffari walk. Work on scent activities has found them tiring and calming in a way distance alone is not, and owners of high-energy dogs frequently discover that ten minutes of nose work settles an animal that an hour of running did not.

This also reframes the pulling problem. A dog that drags its owner toward every verge is not being disobedient so much as trying to do the thing it came out to do, and walks that build in sniffing stops reduce the conflict rather than requiring it to be trained out.

February adds practical considerations. Road salt irritates and cracks paws and is harmful if licked off, ice conceals sharp debris, and short-coated or elderly dogs lose heat quickly when walking slowly rather than running.

How to take part

• Let the dog choose the route for once, and follow it.
• Allow sniffing. It is the point of the walk, not a delay to it.
• Use a longer lead or a harness, which makes stopping less of a struggle.
• Rinse paws after gritted pavements and check between the pads.
• Try ten minutes of scent games indoors and see how much it tires them.