I’ve seen recently dog owners pulling at their pooch to keep walking rather than letting them sniff. So, I thought I’d do a post all about the importance of sniffing for canines.
Did you know a dog can have up to 250 million smell receptors?! Compared to us humans who only have 5-6 million. They can smell up to 40 feet below the ground and even sniff out cancer cells.
How clever!
Where as us humans use our eyes to process most of our world around us, dogs do this with their sense of smell. They kind of smell in 3D.
When a dog smells a tree, they can approximately tell how long ago another dog recently passed through the area, their gender, what they like to eat and what kind of mood that dog was in. Similarly, when a new person comes into their home and sniffs the trouser leg, they are gaining knowledge about this newbie. Like where they live and if they have any pets at home.
Although it is tempting to tug on your dogs lead to complete the walk, remember that a worthwhile dog walk isn’t always measured in miles or minutes.
Take a minute to think of how confined a dog’s life is.
Us as owners’ control everything they do, where they sleep, when and what they eat, restrict their boundaries with fences, stairgates and such like. All for good reason, don’t get me wrong on that. So, when we decide to take them for a walk and let them have a good sniff, it’s a freeing feeling for them.
Dog owners know to take their dog for a daily walk to keep them physically healthy and to burn copious amounts of energy some dogs seem to have. But did you know there are other ways to satisfy their needs?
Giving your pooch that extra minute to sniff a lamppost tires them out mentally as it takes up a lot of energy for them to identify and interpret all the information they receive. Kind of like us doing a hard sudoku or crossword puzzle – it mentally tires us out.
Letting your dog use their brain through sniffing more on walks or even enrichment games with food will help keep their cognitive decline at bay when they get older.
OK, what is the best solution for their walks then?
If given the chance, a dog’s walk would be a zig-zag trail with repeated areas three times over instead of the nice loop around the lake us humans envisage. So, it’s about thinking ahead. How much time do you have that day? Only 20 minutes as you’ve got spin class later? That’s fine. Do a mental enrichment walk with them. Just a short walk up the road but let them sniff every single tree if they wish. If it’s a weekend and you can set aside an hour walk for your dog then aim for distance this time. Giving your dog a command to show them its time to move on from sniffing like ‘this way’ or ‘lets go’ will help them understand when its time to carry on walking. Use the same phrase and they will eventually get used to the command and what it means.
At the end of the day its all about compromise. The dogs walk is all about the dog. It is ok for us to hurry them along but there are better ways than tugging hard on their lead and getting cross.
I’ll admit, I’ve done this myself. Maille, our family dog, used to sniff a lot. I was out on a walk and was asking her to ‘come on’ and gave her a little tug but she dug her paws in as the smell mist have been so good when a guy walked past me and said
“Think of it like us reading a newspaper at breakfast time. You get all your information from the past few days from here and you don’t get interrupted. This is our dog’s newspaper reading time”
It changed the way I walked her from then on.
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