What Would a Dog’s Perfect Day Look Like?

As lifelong dog lovers, we want the best for our four-legged friends. We hope to give them the happiest and healthiest lives possible, and view them in a similar light to human family members. An exercise we personally found helpful to focus how we treat our dogs is imagining what their perfect day would look like. This proved most useful, and by incorporating its findings, we noticed near immediate changes in our dogs’ moods and demeanours.

As part of our exercise, we decided that one of our dog’s perfect days would begin with them waking up followed by a long walk in a new and interesting setting with lots of scents to sniff at and explore. Next would be breakfast and quality time spent with its favourite people, or other dogs it is friends with. It would have free access to its favourite toys, receive lots of attention and affection, and be able to run and play off-lead. This time would be unstructured, so allowing the dog to make its own decisions without pressure or direction. After this down time, we would then move into more structured enrichment, training, or work the dog is routinely employed for. Working dogs thrive when given a task, and this could involve advanced obedience, bitework, or tracking. Given we specialise in our protection dog would likely be running through a series of realistic security scenarios, some of which would end with a bite. Our tired but happy dog would then be given some hard-earned downtime before more food and a final settling walk and bed.

This is just a snapshot, and if you do this exercise yourselves, you may decide to create a brief plan to handrail or something far more detailed. Either will be valuable, and when done well will further cement the bond between you and your dog. Our training team would be happy to help you, if you desire, and can be reached on [email protected].