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Walking with puppies
By Cristina Muro: muro.cristina@gmail.com
"My puppy is three months old and when he stops in the street nobody can move him".
This is a typical observation when owners have just bought a puppy and take it for walks on leash the first days.
This observation can be followed by:
The problem begins because lots of owners are recommended to do long walks with the puppies, full of stimuli. He must know lots of things and there is no time to loose, the socialization period will finish so soon! he must experiment everything, he must understand everything in very few weeks.
And the fact is that when the walk is longer than 5 or 10 minutes, the puppy sits down or stays and he doesnīt want to keep on walking.
What is happening? Is he really obstinate?
Or may he simply be tired and completely saturated of information?
A little puppy gets tired soon
A 3-months old puppy should not go for walks longer than 10 minutes. We can add 5 minutes more when he is 4 months old, 5 more when he is 5 months old and so on. Most of dogs donīt need walks longer than half an hour.
If we take the 3-months old puppy for a walk of over 10 minutes, his body is not prepared and evidently he gets tired. How long can walk a child od 3 or 3 years old?
A little puppy gets saturated quickly
Lots of things that we donīt notice can be extremely interesting for puppies:
His brain has to process everything: Can I eat this? How does it smell? Is it dangerous?...
Each square meter of the street contains lots of unknown and new things that he has to understand and assimilate.
How many breaks do we adults need while attending a conference? And if the topic is completely unknown? Put yourself in the place of the puppy discovering EVERYTHING.
The house, the streets... represent a new world for the puppy. If he is tired physically and we add a big amount of stimuli the result is a big exhaustion.
What should we not do?
Besides not getting him too tired and not over stimulate him, we should not force him or pull on the leash or drag him. It is not convenient that the first days we use an attention sound to stimulate him to continue walking. It is too soon and we have to respect these stops.
What should we do?
Letīs think what our objective is when we take the puppy for a walk.
Exercise the puppy? Of course not, his physical constitution doesnīt allow to do too much exercise now.
We want him to walk alongside us, without pulling on the leash? Not yet.
Even if we can stablish some guidelines for the future, this is not the correct moment, there will still be time for this.
Our objective in these first weeks is that he discovers the world, that he has pleasant experiences and that he gains self-confidence little by little.
Of course first thing is not to tire and over stimulate the puppy. In a short walk the number of stimuli will be enough, if his brain is not too tired he will process better.
During the walk he will stop in every little paper,e very little wood, or anything that the puppy wants to see, listen or smell. He must understand what the world around him is, and he will only understand by using his senses. We must let him use them; we must let him have new experiences.
When he stops we stop with him. If we take a chronometer we will be surprised that the stops are not so long as we thought.
When these small things are well assimilated we can go on with more steps. The puppy will need to stop less and less as a lot of assimilation work has already been done.
If we want to make a longer walk, we can plan some rests or we can invent a system so the puppy can "feel the world" without gettung so tired.
Conclusion:
Donīt demand too much to the puppy so he doesnīt get so much tired.
In any case, if the puppy gets tired he must stop, and it is a good thing that he stops if he needs to do so: he will rest for a while and he will have more time to process with a little more calm.
Simply stop with him!
