Welcome to the Wednesday Dogs of Dogster! Every Wednesday, we share a story from one of our Dogsters. This week is about Nicole and her two rescue dogs, Mac and Rosa.
Living with dogs means learning their language, but more importantly, it means realizing they’ve learned ours. I’ve heard people say that dogs don’t understand English but I’m confident those people have never owned a dog. In our home, like many homes with dogs, there is one word we dare not speak unless we are fully prepared to follow through: walk. Even a whisper if the dogs are in the room, or spoken softly when they are in another room, can trigger immediate, full-scale canine chaos. Tails wagging, paws dancing, excited whining, talking, barking, and even running back and forth from the door and back to the hoomans multiple times—there’s no turning back once the ‘W’ word has been spoken.
We changed our tactic for a while and started spelling W-A-L-K. It lasted a couple of months, but Mac soon caught onto it, so we can add ‘knows how to spell important words’ to his resume. While Rosa can’t spell, she is sharp as a tack at understanding Mac’s excitement and all he has to do is stand up fast for her to join him.
Whether I spell ‘walk’ or not doesn’t really matter anymore. Now, just the simple act of putting on my activewear gets the dogs into a frenzy. It’s quite overwhelming, actually, especially if I’m putting on activewear just for comfort or for yoga practice. It doesn’t feel great to have to let them down.
The Evolution of Walks in Our Home
When we first got Rosa, she hated walks. We have a lot of land with trails and a field and we would try to take her off leash at points to see if she would prefer that. Every single time she’d wait until we were distracted by a bird or a cloud, and book it back home. We were never worried, though. Having a homing dog is easy, though it didn’t really help with our own personal fitness.
When Mac arrived, he was extremely interested in walks, but could not be trusted off-leash. He was as opposite to ‘homing dog’ as we could imagine, though he would come back eventually, he needed to run to the horizon and back before resting his head on the front porch.
For many months we felt like walks were a comedy show, with us having to coerce one dog out the door with treats, who walked slowly away from the home hoping we would change our minds and turn around, and the other dog who couldn’t get out of the door fast enough, yet moped and walked as slowly as possible as soon as he realized we were heading back home.
But over time, we’ve been able to convince Rosa that walks are fun and convince Mac that we’ve walked him long enough so he wants to come home to nap.
Rosa and Mac have even become my running buddies. I take them and my daughter in the pram (I’m a sucker for punishment, clearly) and we go for at least two runs/week together. Rosa is an excellent pace setter and could probably easily run a marathon and then some. She’s a herding dog breed, so it’s in her DNA. Mac, on the other hand, gets so excited and sprints the first leg of any run, and by 4-5 km, he’s my resistance training. That’s the problem with getting fit with your dogs, though—our 20-minute walks to our paddock and back don’t tire them out anymore, and they need a few kilometers a day to be satisfied, meaning we need a few kilometers a day too. Be careful what you wish for!
While it’s chaotic and overwhelming, I do love the sense of excitement our pups get when we say walk (and take them on walks or runs). I know that as they age, the frenzy will become more manageable and it’ll be a sign of them slowing down. So for now, I’m reminded to enjoy it, and I’ll probably say the whole word from time to time just to get a reaction—I’m just kidding, I’ll take them on the walks, I’m not a monster!
Do your dogs react when you say the word? Let us know in the comments below!
This article features Nicole, Mac, and Rosa in our Wednesday Dogs of Dogster series.