“The more I’ve learnt, the less I do”
By Natalie Light
Published on 9th April 2024
Wow, that title makes me sound like a terribly lazy dog guardian (and perhaps there’s some truth in that!) but in essence what I mean is that the way I live with my dog family is that I do all I can to help them be as happy as they possibly can be as dogs. I’m sure that’s not news to any of your, or something that you aren’t striving towards yourself, but I certainly have worries and wobbles about not doing enough or not keeping up with the flashy new fads in dog training so I thought I’d write about it for my first PACT lunch.
I LOVE DOGS. It’s as simple as that. In fact, I love all species but there are really only a handful that we can ethically and logistically share our homes with and dogs are certainly on the top of a huge pile of furry, fluffy, hairy, scaly, slimy & feathery housemates. If this goes down well with you all, hopefully I can tell you all about the non-human animals that have shaped my life in another PACT lunch but for now, I want to focus on my day-to-day passion . . . doing less for the benefit of my lovely dogs!
By keeping in a foot in the door of the latest training trends, it can be so easy to get overwhelmed in an attempt to stay up to date and giving your dogs all the enrichment that is available. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some AMAZING resources out there and ideas for jazzing up your dog’s day to day experiences. However, in the pursuit of enriching our companion’s lives, we mustn’t forget the simple pleasures that are out there in the world for the taking . . . and for free!
Our doglets live by their noses and so if we were to take a completely dog-centric view of ‘enrichment’ then we’d simply let them sniff more. That concept doesn’t necessarily make headlines in terms of ‘miraculous’ dog training turnarounds that turn Cujo into Cuddles, but there are more and more fantastic advocates out there helping guardians to learn to meet their dog’s needs through sniffing and it’s certainly something all of my dogs have benefitted from as I’ve learnt more and ‘done’ less on our walks.
As a multi-tasking junkie, I really struggle not to link up and overlap activities in order to ‘maximise’ time. I’m still working on not doing this in pretty much every aspect of my life (!) but I seem to have cracked it with my dog walks. They are for my dog’s enjoyment and that trumps anything else I have to achieve that day. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I’m tired, the house is a tip, it’s been raining for 500 days solid and I can’t bear another muddy walk, but I try my best to be in the moment for however long we’re out together (even if it’s a 10 min BTN walk - ‘Better Than Nothing’). Being in the moment means my phone is only used if I fall in a hole and need rescuing (that’s what phones should be for anyway but again, that’s for another day!). Most importantly, being in the moment means I’m less likely to miss all of the wonderful things that may happen on a walk with my dogs . . . .
. . . I was going to list all of the wonderful things here, but that would simply be selling short what you could experience out there for yourself. So yes, do some training, enjoy some doggy sports but most of all spend time in the moment just watching your dog interacting with the world and all of the wonderful species in it.
Happy walking! x