#171 - No, Not All Dogs Need Walks

You've been told your dog needs daily walks. We get it; everyone has. 

When you were a kid and wanted a dog, your guardians probably said something like, “Okay, but you have to make sure to feed, water, and walk them…”  

And that probably stuck with you until now. Maybe that routine has been great for all your past dogs, but your current dog, the one you love so deeply, is capital S Struggling, and you spend almost every walk trying not to cry. 

In this episode, Emily and Ellen hope you feel a little relief, and even a little liberated when they make their case that, no, not all dogs need walks. Instead, they will help you think through your goals, your needs, and what is actually going to work for you and your beloved companion. Because there are a whole lot of ways to get your dog the movement they need that don’t require busy streets, a flood of stress, and a miserable time. 

TLDL (too long, didn’t listen): 3 Key Takeaways 

1️⃣ Movement can be joyful – Don’t stick with movement that leads to meltdowns; instead, find something that sparks joy.

2️⃣ Small things often – One more trip to the kitchen, lap around the dining room table, or stretch on the stairs will add up. 

3️⃣ Screw “No Pain, No Gain” – Just because it is easy doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Seriously. 

For the full episode show notes, including the resources mentioned in this episode, go here.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Emily: we are acutely aware of the guilt spiral that happens because there is so much pressure on people to be walking their dogs that I don't know how many, not just clients, pet parent clients, but professionals we have worked with who have continued to try to make walking dogs work because the guilt they feel if they don't do it.

They feel like it's a basic level, a foundational level of dog care, and if they can't do that, they are terrible pet parents, they're terrible behavior professionals, they're terrible animal welfare workers, whatever it is that they do. And so they keep trying to make fetch happen. They keep trying to make walks happen, right?

Not because they want to, not because it's a good experience for them, not because they see that they're, it's helping their dogs, but because they feel like they have to, and if they don't, it means that they are failing their dog. So this is not an episode to shame anybody who has been in that position.

It's more an episode to liberate you. I hope you feel liberated, not shamed by this episode because this is not about whether or not you've done it wrong or right. This is not a moral judgment. The goal is to teach people how to objectively assess what actually supports the needs of everybody involved, the dogs, the humans, anybody else who may be impacted by this, right?

[00:01:40] Allie: Welcome to Enrichment for the Real World, the podcast devoted to improving the quality of life of pets and their people through enrichment. We are your hosts, Allie Bender...

[00:01:50] Emily: ...and I'm Emily Strong...

[00:01:52] Allie: ...and we are here to challenge and expand your view of what enrichment is, what enrichment can be and what enrichment can do for you and the animals in your lives. Let's get started.

 Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Enrichment for the Real World, and I want to thank you for rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:02:13] Emily: You've probably been told to walk your reactive or anxious or high energy dog more. And I'm gonna pull an Oprah and ask, " How's that going for you? How'd that work out?"

And, and sit with, with that question for a little bit, and allow yourself to answer that honestly. Because what we get told over and over and over again is usually either not true or it's a partial truth. And the only reason we believe it to our core is because it's just been hammered into us. But hearing something multiple times...

no, I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna rephrase that sentence. The measure of how accurate a statement is is not how many times it's been said in how many places. So just because everybody's saying it doesn't make it true. So today we're exploring why we don't reflexively prescribe walks, why we often tell people, our clients, our students whoever else, to stop walking their dog, and what we think about instead, what the discussion that we have with them instead of just saying, "Walk your dog more, walk your dog more, walk your dog more, walk your dog more. Your dog should be on walks. Your dog should get walks." So why does this matter?

Because bad exercise recommendations cause real harm. We're either r- running the risk of flooding reactive dogs, or exhausting their handlers, or creating more arousal, trigger stacking these poor kiddos over and over again, or exacerbating medical conditions. And this topic reminds me of when we had Laurie Stevens on the podcast a while back, and she, she stated it so beautifully.

She said, " Movement is behavioral therapy, but only when it's the right movement for the animal in front of us." Right? The right movement for the right dog, I think is how she phrased it. So we're gonna dive deeper into that concept, and by the end of this episode, we hope you will have a different lens for evaluating what physical exercise is actually for.

Like, what's the purpose of it? Why are we doing it? And you'll have some real alternatives to try. All right. I'm gonna tell a little story, and whoever said this to me, if you're listening, I am ... This is not meant to shame you at all. It was actually good feedback because it was like, "Oh, we need to refine our messaging."

But at the Clicker Expo that wasn't in 2020, somebody walked up to me and said, "I just read your book and I love it, and it just reminded me of, you know, it's like we're rehashing that a tired dog is a good dog thing."

And I just died a little bit on the inside. I was like, oh, that's not the message at all. I feel like maybe we need to refine our messaging, because if that's what you took away from this, we have not succeeded at communicating what we're trying to communicate. Eh, but, like, the thing is, I understand why that was her takeaway, because it is such a common, like, received wisdom that we all get from our, our culture, right?

Our society. And the problem with it isn't that it's entirely wrong. If it were entirely wrong, it wouldn't be as dangerous, 'cause everybody would hear it and go no thanks. Hard pass." The thing that makes it dangerous is that it's only partially right. And that the partially right things are the most dangerous things because you hear the thing that you, you connect with, and you're like, "Oh, I have seen that before," and then you swallow everything else whole along with the good stuff, and that's where harm So here's what I mean by that in this context of that, that, that a tired dog is a good dog thing. A lot of times walks fail for dogs either because they're reactive on leash, they're over threshold before the walk starts, the owner or the client or the handler's anxiety is getting transferred to the dog.

Um, the arousal doesn't come down. The dog doesn't have the skills or the opportunity to complete their stress response cycle. When people are trying to do exposure and give the dog opportunities to practice skills, the dogs don't have the skills yet, and so the, they end up just being flooding. It can, like we said earlier, it can exacerbate medical issues if you just keep trying to make the dog love walks, and the reason they don't love the walks is a medical reason.

All of these things can happen, and I think happen more frequently than people realize because we've all been told that a tired dog is a good dog, and we need to take them out and get them on a walk and wear them out. And what's especially insidious about this is that a lot of times after experiencing extreme stress or a lot of pain, discomfort, the dogs do come home and crash, but it's not because they are satiated, their needs have been met, and now they can complete their stress response cycle and rest.

It's because they are exhausted and depleted, and they have nothing left, and that is not a state we wanna put our dogs in on a daily basis or even a weekly basis. I'm gonna say even a monthly basis. Like, there's a difference between physically, behaviorally, and emotionally healthy rest and depleted exhaustion.

And I think anybody listening to this can remember a time when they have experienced depleted exhaustion, and I hope y'all can all remember a time when you have experienced rest that comes from your needs being met. And I think we can all understand the difference in those two experiences and why the first is not our goal and the second is our goal, right?

But having, having just said that, I f- I wanna point out that we are not shaming anybody here who has done that to their dog, because we are acutely aware of the guilt spiral that happens because there is so much pressure on people to be walking their dogs that I don't know how many, not just clients, pet parent clients, but professionals we have worked with who have continued to try to make walking dogs work because the guilt they feel if they don't do it.

They feel like it's a basic level, a foundational level of dog care, and if they can't do that, they are terrible pet parents, they're terrible behavior professionals, they're terrible animal welfare workers, whatever it is that they do. And so they keep trying to make fetch happen. They keep trying to make walks happen, right?

Not because they want to, not because it's a good experience for them, not because they see that they're, it's helping their dogs, but because they feel like they have to, and if they don't, it means that they are failing their dog. So this is not an episode to shame anybody who has been in that position.

It's more an episode to liberate you. I hope you feel liberated, not shamed by this episode because this is not about whether or not you've done it wrong or right. This is not a moral judgment. The goal is to teach people how to objectively assess what actually supports the needs of everybody involved, the dogs, the humans, anybody else who may be impacted by this, right?

And this connects to the bigger theme from our Present Over Perfect episode, I think 115 where we talked about the fact that imperfect enrichment that actually happens is far better than, quote-unquote, "perfect enrichment" that doesn't happen or happens at the welfare and wellbeing expense of everybody involved, in which case it's not actually enrichment, right?

So this idea that all dogs need X minutes of walking per day, we can throw that out the window, okay? What we're actually looking for is the quality of movement that supports the needs of the dog- And the duration that allows them to get what they need from that exercise. That's what we're actually looking at, quality and duration that supports the actual animal in front of us, not a prescriptive all dogs need to be walking an hour a day type of thing.

Now, there is a little teeny, tiny kernel of truth that I think maybe perhaps we have inadvertently contributed to this belief system because in the book we do talk about the fact that there was some research indicating that if humans did sustained cardiovascular exercise for 21 minutes every day for two months, they found that the humans experienced a reduction in anxiety.

And f- 21 minutes is an odd number, but below that they didn't see that reduction in anxiety. Above that they didn't see significantly better reduction in anxiety. So for whatever reason, 21 minutes was the magic number. And we were talking about how Ally and I with our clients had tried that with some really anxious dogs, and anecdotally we saw that that also helped those dogs.

That does not mean that the message in our book was every dog should have 21 minutes of sustained cardiovascular exercise every day or you're not meeting your dog's needs. So I wanna clarify that because I think that might be why some people have thought that that's what we were telling you to do.

That's, that is not, that was not the message at all, right? We're looking at quality of movement and duration that supports the actual dog in front of us. And this is also where breed matters. This is, this is one of the situations where morphology actually does super, super play into it.

And it's something that doctor at the time of the interview she was going by Jessica Heckman, she is now Perry Heckman, but Dr. Jessica Heckman in episode number, or 28 and then we expanded on it in the next episode which was breed typical enrichment. One of the things that we were talking about is that a border collie and a basset hound have very different movement needs.

Prescribing the same walk for both dogs is a miss. And, and in this case it actually does it is about their morphology, not necessarily about whether or not they came from working lines or pet lines or casual breeders or ethical breeders. Like that wasn't actually the message at all. In this case, morphology really does matter because the physical needs of a physical body that has short legs and a long back and really, and a really heavy dog is going to look very different than the physical needs of a dog with long legs and a proportionate back, and is a lighter weight dog, right?

Those two body types will have very different physical needs, so the exercise regimen for those dogs will change based on their morphology. Now, that said, there is still variability among individuals. You can have two border collies and one is a one-year-old perfectly healthy able-bodied puppy, and one is an 11-year-old border collie with significant arthritis, and obviously those two animals are going to have very different exercise needs as well.

So we're not saying that you can prescribe exercise based on morphology. What we are saying is that morphology plays a very important role in assessing what those physical exercise needs are for that individual. And a basset hound is never going to need the same thing that a border collie needs, but within those morphological types there is still variability based on age, health.

I don't know, I mean, I would even say whatever, whatever personality means tendencies, let's say tendencies, right? Behavioral tendencies. What they enjoy, what they're motivated by, all of those things are going to influence the individual's needs. But there's a baseline of morphology. I'm never gonna ask a Pekingese what I ask a greyhound to do,

right?

[00:14:48] Ellen: And I think we could even j- we could take... Breed is a really clear way for us to give people an image of the body type that we are talking about, the morphology that we are talking about. Whether it is a basset hound or a dachshund, I am not going to be asking a basset hound and a dachshund to be doing jumps and agility

as, like, their, their base thing.

I, in Pet Pro, we were just... Somebody was, is helping a client with a dog who's nervous of a set of stairs, and morphology matters dramatically when we are looking at some of those things because I look at these stairs, and if you have a Frenchie or a English bulldog or a dachshund, I saw that top step in particular in the picture and was like, "they physically can't." There's no angle in which that dog is going to be able to do that movement pattern safely. They are going to fall. So there are things, there are just limitations. I can't fit in teeny-tiny spaces because I am a big human versus my partner can't reach high things without some help because he's shorter. So it's just a part of what our bodies can do. I can scratch my entire back by myself. Apparently, that's not a normal human to be able to do. Had no idea 

[00:16:10] Emily: Those of us with connective tissues have... I mean, we all have connective tissues. That's not what I meant. Those of us with connective tissue disorders have stretching ability, and I would say stretching needs, that people who don't have connective tissue disorders don't have, right? Yeah, and I think this ties back to, I can't remember what episode it was in because it wasn't the theme of the episode, but a while back we had posted on social media a discussion about how if you, if you are in the middle of a terrible winter where the snow is up to your second floor balcony, or if you're in a really hot place where it's 122 degrees outside, and outsize s- outside exercise isn't an option, one of the things that we said this could be an alternative was walking up and down stairs.

And woo, we had a lot of people who had big feelings about that recommendation, and I think part of the problem is they were t- they were k- approaching the conversation with a prescriptive mindset. They were assuming that we were saying all dogs can do this. 

[00:17:18] Ellen: Run with no traction as fast as you can, barrel up and down the stairs, not take one step at a time and engage your shoulders, engage your glutes, engage your core

[00:17:31] Emily: And the thing is, for some dogs, walking up and down stairs is legitimately a terrible recommendation, and I support people in saying we should never have walking up and down stairs on this dog's enrichment plan. But that's not the same thing as saying dogs should never walk up and down stairs, and that is a terrible idea for all dogs.

And I do remember in a previous episode I had commented that, like, I have worked with a physical therapist who actually recommended walking up and down stairs as therapy for the dogs I was working with. So it is, there is a, a valid justification for it in some situations. And the reason I'm bringing that up now is because that is something that works well.

Well, it doesn't anymore because now Oso is an old man, and he's got bad hips, but when he was younger and able-bodied, and he didn't have arthritis, which I guess is redundant, but anyway walking up and down stairs actually was a really good exercise for him. And one of the reasons that it was is because the, the height of each stair in Ally's house happens to be the height of Oso's natural gait as he lifts his paws.

So for him, walking up and down stairs facilitates the natural movement and pr- and works those muscles of lifting his feet up, both f- fore legs and hind legs, right? Now, if Ally had a Pekingese, those stairs would not be appropriate exercise for that dog because the dog couldn't walk up and down the stairs.

They would have to jump from one step to another. So that, that, my whole story about the, the stair exercise was tying back to this idea of, like, the type of exercise really depends on the individual, including, like, the baseline, the first place we start is their morphology. Are we asking this dog to do an exercise that facilitates natural movement that their bodies are designed to do?

Or are we asking them to do movements that actually lie outside of the natural range of motion for their joints? 

[00:19:45] Ellen: And I'm also gonna add um, more than just their joints

because what we can ask of a brachycephalic dog, so dogs with smushy face

that have breathing problems, is wildly different than we can ask of a dog with a elongated snout

[00:20:02] Emily: I actually had a Pekingese for four years. He was a very long-term foster until my sister ended up adopting him because nobody else wanted him. He was a complicated little dude. But he found a really good home with my sister and, and was BFFs with her dog. So he had a happy ending, but I had him for four years.

And the, the vet that I worked with at the time told me he should, especially because we were in Texas and it's hot, he should never get cardiovascular exercise on land. So we, we practiced like, gentle walks, we practiced l- little happy, fun exercises that moved his muscles and worked his muscles but didn't actually make him pant.

And the only time that he got f- real cardiovascular exercise was when I would take him in our swimming pool and I would support his abdomen to keep his head well above water and let him paddle and paddle and paddle. And even then, we had to watch out for like how elevated his heart rate became. And I was not, y'all, I wasn't actually making the judgment based on his heart rate.

I made the judgment based on how heavy his breathing ra- was. But I would actually give him breaks w- if he started breathing too hard because he was so brachycephalic, he had a concave face. Not a, not e- it wasn't even a flat face. It was like his, his nose was behind his jaw. So, for him, w- like normally it would be wild to say this dog should never have cardiovascular exercise, but for this dog we had to find ways to exercise him that didn't really get him up to panting because that would have been an incredibly risky physiological state for him to be in

[00:21:47] Ellen: For me, I shifted from thinking about physical exercise to movement, just movement.

Because there's a lot that we can achieve when we shift from those things, particularly those of us that were raised in the '90s. I'm sure other decades

have this too, but, like, yeah, there's just been a lot around exercise, and there's a lot of baggage that comes with the idea of exercise.

So when I shifted from how do I exercise my dog to how do I provide my dog adequate movement-

It opened up a lot of other options for us

to keep our dogs happy, as healthy as these two messes can be,

and very fit. So both of my dogs don't get typical walks, and they are very fit by objective measures.

They have good muscle tone. They have good mobility. They good h- have good range of motion. They are able to do pretty complex things when we go to the rehab vet because we work on very targeted things that aren't just walk in a straight line on a sidewalk, maybe sniff this grass, maybe try to avoid the angry neighbor who has the don't tread on my lawn signs.

You know? All of that. So reframing from physical exercise to what is going to be adequate and fulfilling movement can be one of the ways that we kind of shake things up. And

we want to look at, what are we trying to achieve with this pet?

So do we want arousal reduction? So back to your research on the um, 21 minutes for humans.

I have started to do the same thing. There was recently a paper that I read that was looking, again, in humans because we take a lot of inspiration from humans. Try it with dogs anecdotally. Did it work for our clientele or not? Um, It was a paper that was looking at treatment of panic disorders in humans. And so the experience, the physiological experience of a panic disorder and the physiological experience of really pushing in terms of cardiovascular output in exercise is very similar, if not the same. I don't know enough to say the same, but it's similar enough physiologically. What they were doing for intervention for people with panic disorders was saying, "Certain number of times a week, we want you to do sprints for 30 seconds, and then practice your deescalation or your breathwork or your recovery."

And it was doing a couple of things for these people. One, it was giving them the opportunity to control that physiological experience. So panic attacks are not within our control, and

all of a sudden you have this cascade where you are miserable. Like, your body thinks it's gonna die.

The appraisal of that is going to be negative. When

you know it's coming, and you know that it's targeted, and you can turn it on, and you can turn it off, and you have the control, we're putting the control in the hands of the learner. We are also saying every time you feel this way does not mean that you are going to feel like you're going to die So we're breaking the association that that increased heart rate, that increased respiration, the muscles tightening, all of the cascade of things that happen aren't only associated with this negative thing. I've been doing that with some of my client dogs as well. So instead of doing the sustained cardio, the 21 minutes or so, can we get 30-second sprints in there? And then can we do our de-escalation work? And then can we get 30-second sprint in there? And then can we do the de-escalation work?

Because it's something I did with Griffy very organically through tug and flirt pole, and we used to do back when he could touch grass, we would do um, what I call runaway recall. So he would be over there, and I would take off and go as far as I possibly could, which was not very far because he's very fast, and then he would recall to me, and then we would do the de-escalation work, and then I would take off. And what I saw is that we can have a dog that can feel a lot of feelings really fast, and

when we practice this, we feel feelings, and then we can quickly turn it around and deal with them. He can, in the span of less than three minutes, have a huge spike in arousal because something scary happened and then come back down and be ready to go to sleep because we

have practiced that so many times. So his physical exercise regimen was around, can I get both a baseline arousal reduction in his day-to-day life and also when arousal happens, which is gonna happen, can we

recover faster?

That is

a very different goal than cardiovascular health. So if we have a dog with a cardiovascular problem, your veterinarian can dictate what is going to help improve that health. That's very different than both of my dogs who go to a rehab vet, and their goal is long-term mobility and

graceful aging. That's all, that's all, and pain management.

But, like, 

all of those things kind of go together for me. And so we go in, and it's every time it changes. What is sticky right now? What is a little achy right now? Where are we seeing that there's some lameness? Where are we seeing that there's some, some challenge, and how do we address that over the next month or so?

And that changes every time. And part of that for my dogs is going up and down the stairs. So I intentionally, both for my own movement and for theirs, make sure that we take lots of trips down stairs, because my office is upstairs, solely to practice going up and down stairs gracefully, gently, quietly,

all of that.

[00:27:21] Emily: all of that is beautiful, and when you were talking about that, it made me think about the fact that Miley naturally does that on her own, and that's one of the reasons that I talk about how impressed I am about how the labels they use for her are, like, resilient and behaviorally and emotionally healthy.

Because when she gets hurt her response to pain is well, doing zoomies. Like, she does a few laps around the house, and then she can complete her stress response cycle. And y'all, we're not constantly hurting our dog, okay? But, you know, when she was very young and I've just talked openly about the fact that C- Copper bit her on her face twice, and then there was a time when I was in bed and I was getting out of bed, I didn't know she was on the floor by the bed, and I accidentally swung my leg up and my heel just clocked her jaw and it hurt.

I know it hurt 'cause she did zoomies, right? So I'm not saying that my dog is in pain all the time, but when she has had moments of pain, her response to that instead of aggressing or reacting is she runs zoomies, and then she can be okay. She shakes it off. She'll literally, like, z- zoomies, shake off, and then go right back to whatever she was doing.

And that... So, like, we see that what the, what the medical p- professionals are now recommending to humans with panic disorders is sort of it, like, that's how we... When we haven't been messed with that is how we were designed to recover from those things. And I think, does he... He talks about that in The Body Keeps the Score, right?

Isn't in their discussion... There's some, I can't remember which book it was. I think it's The Body Keeps the Score. He talks about how, like, the reason non-humans have less or fewer instances of, of PTSD-like behaviors than humans is because they have this built-in mechanism to, like, literally, like, move their body and shake off afterwards, and humans have kind of lost that.

But also take that with a huge grain of salt because I don't even remember what book it was, so I'm probably not accurately recalling exactly what he said. But I was thinking about the fact, like, we would need a trigger warning for me to talk about the ways that I was coerced, shamed, and physically harmed as a child because people were trying to force me to do physical exercise that actually harmed my body because I had multiple undiagnosed issues, and it caused permanent damage.

So we're not gonna talk about the details of that at all because that's, that's not the point of this episode. But what what's interesting is that my a s- a thing that I didn't realize that I was doing as a coping mechanism because I physically can't run without causing- Really severe damage to my body is when I have those moments of extreme distress or extreme pain, what I have historically done is I will get like a broom or a bat or something and just beat the ever-loving crap out of my pillows.

Like, I just scream and beat my pillows.

And I am getting similar cardiovascular exercise, not to mention that screaming stimulates the vagus nerve, which helps with neurochemical stuff. But it, it, because I can't run, but I am still doing a thing that gets that physiological state going, so I'm using movement as a way to recover from stress.

And it wasn't an... I, I learned about movement as stress recovery aft- long after I had been using that as a coping mechanism. And I was like, "Oh, wow this is my, like, replacement for running. Like, I can't run it off, so, like, this is what I do instead." And I f- I find that fascinating that, like, our bodies actually, not always, but sometimes our bodies have really clever ways of adapting, right?

[00:31:07] Ellen: When we're switching that focus from physical exercise to goal-oriented movement, we can get really creative with what it is. And when you just watch your dog move in time and space, just sit, your parrot, your cat, any pet, just watch how they interact with the world, you start to see that there's a lot of movement opportunities that you can just capitalize on.

You don't have to cultivate more or artificial ones. You can say, "How could I make this a little more effective?" So things like sniff or decompression walks, they're still a walk, and they're still not going to be available to all dogs in all situations because I work with a number of dogs that the outside world is just dangerous.

And yes, we are working on it, and The outside world is just dangerous or scary,

and having them go out for a walk does more harm than good.

It could be things like flirt pole. So I have a client that I just met with that was doing evening walks, and it was a nightmare for her and her dog. It was just trigger city out there every time, and they started doing a different rotation of flirt pole in the yard with some scent games and some training and some chase, and the

both of them are better for it. It has improved the quality of life for both of them. Tug can be a great one. I know tug is controversial. Ugh, that's not what today is about. There are safe ways to play tug. Tug is a critical part of the way that we maintain Griffey's cardiovascular health, because that is one of the to- the games that he uses to cope strongly, and it's very effective.

We can do scatter feeding in the yard. So if we were to watch the way a dog moves on a trail or in the woods, we can observe that, go watch a video and say, "How can I replicate that in my yard?" It can be things like burying concrete cylinders so that they have a quote-unquote log to go over. It can be being creative with the type of plants that you put out there or the way you arrange your containers on your garden so that they have to weave in and out through the things, and they're bending their spine, and they're moving in ways that they don't normally do it.

We

can look at trick training as movement. So if you're training your dog to get in a box, they have to mechanically move all four feet. You can teach them that they have different body parts that they didn't know that they had. You can teach them to hold feet up if that is safe for them to do so, so that they're working different parts of their body through all of those things.

We can do swimming if your dog is into that and you have that readily available to you. We can do hikes as a way that might go under the sniffy walks. But hikes with that vertical incline and all of the things that they have to navigate their feet around can be helpful. And then canine conditioning and fitness is one that is been in our rotation for eight, almost 10 years now for both of my dogs, and I swear it is the reason that at 10 and 14 you would never know had they not grayed the way that they do.

They're both extremely muscular

in the way that they move, and that also means that you can target specific muscle groups to help stabilize the body and maintain mobility as they age

[00:34:30] Emily: Yeah. um, so for, for those of you who've been listening to our podcast for a, a long time um, you might remember that last year we thought that Copper had spinal cancer, and it ended up just being an atypical reaction to the Librela. And we took him off the Librela, and we genuinely believed that we were in hospice with, with Copper.

He was in really bad shape. He couldn't use his hind end. And he... So h- he had gained 13 pounds of muscle mass on the Librela, and we were expecting him to just waste away and go back down to where he'd been at before the Librela. Well, we have two advantages that are not... We didn't, we didn't intentionally do it.

We just have advantages. One is our backyard. It's on a, a slight, gentle incline, and we have multiple trees and bushes. We have these bushes that kind of form a privacy fence almost, and, but they, the way that they grow, they grow, the leaves don't start until about a foot or two off the ground. So it's created a natural tunnel for the dogs.

Um, We have a shed that they can go around and dig under. There's, you know, little wildlife likes to hide under the shed, so it's like a little scent area. We have an area that has tall, I don't actually know what the plant is, but it's some kind of ground cover plant that is um, about a foot tall.

And I watch our dogs in the backyard. They are sniffing. They are digging. They are tunneling. They are running. They walk through, the wildlife provides all of the scent work but they walk through the ground cover to kind of explore, like, what little critters are down there, and they have to pick up both their front and their hind feet really high to get through this ground cover.

And I was like, "Wow, we just lucked out. Our backyard is a sensory garden and a physical therapy playground for our dogs at the same time." Our second advantage is Miley. Now, I'm going to preface this by saying that I do not recommend that people get puppies with geriatric dogs in general. I think most people are going to have a very hard time navigating the complexities of having a puppy and a geriatric dog together.

We talk about that in another episode, in our multi-house Q&A episode.

You can go back to the multi-pet Q&A to hear me talk about why that is.

But we, because I made that choice and, and I know how to navigate it and we're doing well, Miley, we joke that Miley has become Copper's physical therapist because she keeps him active. She keeps him moving. She plays with him, and, and he loves it. He instigates play with her. Now, the reason he loves it is because we've also um, been able to sort of moderate her, and when he's tired and he opts out, we set our environment up so that she can't keep pestering him.

But because he has an opt out and we make sure that he has the ability to opt out, he opts in multiple times a day to playing with Miley. He will instigate play with her, and I watch them outside together, and she keeps him up and moving and exploring. Even if they're not, like, roughhouse tumbling, they're h- they're walking together.

They're doing this parallel play and exploration together. So yesterday he went back to the vet because he regained full mobility pretty quickly after he got off the Librela and um, we just wanted to take him in for his annual. His, his hind end is starting to get a little weaker, and we wanted to see if there was anything else we could do for him.

He has only lost five and a half pounds of muscle mass o- being off the Librela. The vet was shocked at how well-muscled he is as a 17-year-old dog, and he is doing so much better than we ever anticipated and that's because w- we have... Again, I'm not taking credit for this, but we have an environment and he has a lifestyle that allows him to stay active at a level that actually supports his joints rather than compromising them.

So he's 17, a year past being partially paralyzed, and he is active. When he does his stretch, his sternum touches the floor when he goes into downward dog. He's got full range of motion and, and he's just crushing it, right?

[00:39:01] Ellen: And for those of you, 'cause I- Griffey can't touch grass. I have talked about this many times. When Griffey touches grass, one of two things happens. One, we have to give him a bath and wash every piece of fabric that is in the house and vacuum. Like, we have to do a full house clean, particularly if he's touched anything after he touched grass. If we manage his allergies and we do all of those things, then we probably won't see a- an allergy flare, but when we see an allergy flare, it is very bad. It is blisters, it is ear infection, it is skin pinkening, it is hair loss, it is licking, it is inflammation, and it also comes with irritability and potential aggression. Because when he is in pain, and skin- Like that is painful. He does zoomie and he tries to cope with it, and also there's a, there's a, a ceiling to what we can do to make him comfortable. So for him, it is a high risk for him to go engage with the natural environment, which is heartbreaking and also he has a very good quality of life without it. We do the same thing that Emily was talking about in her yard in our house. So as much as we possibly can, we give him the opportunity to bend his spine around things. I have obstacles set up in my house that are safe. They can navigate around them if they don't need to, but that also increases their steps. So you can go through the more challenging thing or you can go around the more challenging thing. And setting our environment up like this enables our dogs to practice those ranges of motion that they don't get to do more naturally. When I have the spoons, because caretaking capacity is a huge part of this, I will create a makeshift forest floor in a room.

I will take cavaletti poles, so those are just cones with a pole through them so that dogs have to pick up their feet. I will take boxes. I will take bunch of toy carcasses to be leaf litter. I will take like, dog beds and things to sim- simulate unstable surfaces. And we'll do treat scatters in that kind of environment.

So as they are digging for all these treats around the room, they have to weave their spine, they have to pick up their feet, they have to crawl under things, or again, go around. They have choices. They have to sniff on unstable surfaces so that they are working on their core and their proprioception and all of those things. It doesn't have to be this huge extra thing if you get really clever about how to layer it into what already exists in your world that works for you. And so I have, like, uh, doing daily snuffles on the couch in blankets and pillows and dog beds because all of that adds a level of sta- safe instability for her

that she gets to practice her balance, and it's made a big difference in her ability to, like, stand on me.

And then also while we're doing things like scratches and cuddle time and all of that, I slowly layer in how can I turn this into one of their physical exercises, the things that their rehab tech wants them to do. So Two Paws Up, the, Stretching through their back, the front of their legs. What is that called? Hip flexor stretch. There we go.

Their hip flexor stretch is on there that they should be doing that daily to maintain that mobility. So I will station them on the, the the stairs so they're in a nice stretch, and that's when we do some scratches. Or I have small dogs, so I can have them do a hip flexor stretch standing on my thigh while I am on the ground cuddling them.

So we're layering things like their spins into can you walk through my legs while we're walking down the kitchen. We got five repetitions, and I was gonna go here anyway. And we help clients do that all the time because having more on your list is exhausting, but layering things on your list can be much more doable

[00:42:59] Emily: Yeah. And finding opportunities to leverage things that you're already doing with your dogs or leverage your environment that your dog is already interacting with is such an accessibility hack because if you design I'm, I'm speaking to behavior professionals here, if you design a plan for a chronically ill handler or a disabled handler that they can't do, they physically can't do, or they can do it, but it's going to take all of their spoons, and then they're depleted for the rest of the day then it's not a sustainable plan.

It's not a workable plan. So we have to build a plan that's actually doable for the clients on top of being meeting the support needs of the animal, right? And that, you know, that's very in line with our enrichment for the real world ethos, but it's also just practical because if you're not building a plan that your client can do, then what's the point?

Why are we here if we're just giving plans to people, and they're like, "Cool, I'm never gonna do this. I can't, I physically can't do it, but thanks for the paper," right? So thinking about how... And this is something that I, I strongly believe in building a plan with people instead of building a plan for people because if you build the plan with them, they know their environment and their routine much better than you do.

So if you're like, "We're looking for a way to get your dog to move their spine back and forth," and they're like, "Oh, well, my dog likes to accompany me to the bathroom," "Cool. While you're on the toilet, can you lure your dog through your legs or around the toilet bowl or..." you know what I mean? 

Like, that's gonna be a much more sustainable plan.

Maybe that was a gross example, but but I mean, like, that's... I was trying to think of something that's just like a real world daily thing that we all have to do. You're held captive when you're on the toilet anyway.

Your dog's already there. You might as well utilize that time, and that is, that's sustainable because you're not asking people to set aside more time to h- help their dog, meet their dog's physical needs.

You're just leveraging what they already have available to them. And, you know, I know not everybody just happened to move into a house with an automatic sensory garden. I am very aware of my intense privilege, and also I was able to leverage my environment for my entire life, and I have lived in much less enriching spaces.

So you can do this whether or not you just happened to move into a place with a sensory garden, right?

[00:45:41] Ellen: I think one of my favorite aha moments that I saw in Pet Pro, we were talking about a dog who needed a couple of different things. We had gone through the list of, like, what does this dog need? Not what skills do we need to teach, but what does this dog need? And this person had clocked that they need to do more foraging, and they thought that more physical exercise was going to be beneficial.

But doing both of those things felt like adding two things to the list. And so we went through the foraging options that they had in their mind, and people in Pet Pro are probably really tired of me saying this. Uh, What does that look like? 

What do you observe, and What does that look like can be a little ableist, but genuinely I want to know, like, what does the picture of this activity look like? Because on the list of foraging were things like find it. Cool. How do you define find it? How does the dog move? Where can you do find it? What is available to you? Because I just talked about obstacle scatter feeding, where we put ... I create the forest floor, artificial forest floor, and that is a lot of movement for my dogs on top of the scent work, so it's not more.

And if you have a client that has a room that they don't use for anything and can just leave obstacles out, that's very accessible. Um, They had something like a Kong, which again, what does that look like for the dog? Because I have one dog that that's a very stationary activity, and I have one that's a very active activity.

If you give Griffy a Kong, he'll take it, he'll chomp it, which is horrifying to think that, like, you took a frozen Kong and just crushed it in your jaws. Makes me uncomfortable every time.

But he will take it to the highest point in the house, throw it down, get down, take whatever fell out, chomp it again, take it to a high point, throw it. And

so that is incredibly active for him. There was a Kong Wobbler. What does that look like? Or a Bob-a-Lot or something like that. What does that look like? Because what I just heard you tell me is you've got potentially three foraging activities, all of which would increase the movement for this dog and does not require your client to go outside.

It does not require your client to put on sunscreen, does not require your client to drive to a park because they don't have sidewalks where they live. That does not require your client use an Uber because they don't actually have a car, and they live in the city, and we're working on the city, but gosh dang, it's hard. So they had this huge aha movement, moment that like- I can do more with one thing if I pause and say, "How does this look on this dog?

And how does this look on a lot of dogs? Could this be an option that I could try with this dog to get more movement?" Because movement is important. That literature across the board is gonna tell you that moving your body more often is going to be beneficial for pretty much everything. But the more they do research, the more it's not the ablest idea of physical exercise. Like,

little two-minute from your chair muscle building exercises can be incredibly effective for all of those benefits.

And we can do the same idea with our dogs or our cats or our birds

[00:49:02] Emily: It's true. I think, yeah, the, the idea of exercise has kind of been ruined by the sort of like '80s no pain, no gain ethos because what's actually beneficial can be a lot more subtle than that. And figuring out for me, like I doubled my daily step count, and y'all, I'm aware that step count is not the end-all be-all, right?

But just, it's an easy metric for f- for assessing how much I'm moving through the day.

It's measurable I doubled my step count by being less efficient. So like if I had to get up and go to the bathroom and get water and get my charger, instead of just doing all three of those things in one go, I would go get my charger, bring it back, plug it in.

I would go get some water, bring it back, and then I would go to the bathroom and then come back.

And just by being less efficient, I doubled my, my step count of every day. So, that is... It matters. Like all those little movement choices add up, and we can think about that for our pets too. Like what ways are we...

So for example, when I couldn't when I was in physical therapy for my feet and I, for two months I couldn't take Miley on her walks it looked like in- instead of just doing normal scatter feeding, chucking food on opposite ends of the yard, so she had to kind of run back and forth to find the food, right?

Those little choices make big differences over time.

[00:50:31] Ellen: Yeah. I invite my dogs to come downstairs with me every time

because, again, that's one more trip up and down the stairs. I'm fine with that. I don't have any worries about hyper attachment, whatever that means. Do you wanna, do you wanna come to the kitchen? I'll give you a cookie. I don't know. Tara, I'm gonna get water.

You can get water. It's a little bit more of that just day-to-day interact with me, and it

makes a big difference. It adds up,

when I was first working on this with my um, dietician, because same thing, like can we just increase baseline metabolic expenditure in day-to-day stuff I had a moment of one squat a day, why even bother? One squat a day for a year is 365 more squats. One squat today feels like nothing, but if I did this one squat a

day for 365 days, I have done 365 more squats and 365 more squats feels like something. So if we can just layer in one more trip up and down the stairs, or one more down to stand if that is safe for your dog, or one more spin around my legs in both directions. If you did that once a day every day, your dog has practiced that 365 more times, and that is

a, a, that is not a nothing number

[00:51:53] Emily: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Making, making those little choices for you and your pets can make a big difference.

[00:52:00] Ellen: So for this week, honestly, just observe your pet. Watch how they move in space. Watch when they get up. When do they lie down? How do they decide to travel through the house or the apartment or the yard or wherever you take them? Are you able to add a little bit more diversity of movement? Could you give them one obstacle to step over in one of their paths that would be safe for the humans? Are you able to have them walk on one unstable surface that they didn't walk on before to add a little bit of that proprioceptive input? Are you able to practice one thing that would add a full body range of motion change this week?

[00:52:46] Emily: And for pros, when a client says, "But I need to walk my dog," ask, "What are you hoping the walk will accomplish?" That answer actually ends up shaping everything. It gives you so much information about why the client feels the walk is necessary, what pain point they're trying to alleviate, what they're motivated by, what their concerns are.

And then that gives you the opportunity to help them find a solution that actually works for both them and their pet. So if you as a, a dog owner, a pet parent feel like walking your dog has been a chore or a battle, you're not lazy. You may have just been handed the wrong tool and/or bullied into believing that you have to do this, and we don't love bullies here at Pet Harmony.

We, we wanna give people the tools to resist the bullies. So remember that this, the pressure that you are feeling to walk your dog is a framework problem. It's a systems problem. It's a cultural problem. It's not a you problem

[00:53:53] Ellen: Walks 

aren't bad.

They can be really effective. They can be a great warmup. Depending on the environment, they can meet all of the needs that you have been told a walk will meet. They can be great for humans too. It can be a nice two birds, one scone type situation. They're just not always the answer, and we have to look at the duo in front of us, both the dog and the human. Are walks safe, comfortable, and meeting our needs on both ends of the leash? Because if the answer is no, we can look at why do you need, why do you feel, what do you hope this walk will do for you? And we can find many alternatives that are going to help you

[00:54:35] Allie: I hope you enjoy today's episode and if there's someone in your life who also needs to hear this, be sure to text it to them right now. If you're a pet parent looking for more tips on enrichment, behavior modification, and finding harmony with your pet, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Harmony training. If you're a behavior or training professional dedicated to enrichment for yourself, your clients, and their pets, check us out on TikTok and Instagram at Pet Harmony Pro.

As always, links to everything we discussed in this episode are in the show notes. Thank you to Ellen Yoakum for editing this episode and making us sound good. Our intro music is from Penguin Music on Pixa Bay. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps more pet lovers and professionals find us so they can bring enrichment into their world too.

Thank you for listening, and here's to harmony.