Dogs are not people. Houses are not a dog’s natural habitat. For the most part, it’s only been the last 50 years that dogs have been let inside. For almost the entirety of human history, dogs have lived outdoors. They were known to be dirty, disease vectors, and potentially aggressive. Historically, they were seen as pests or livestock. Dogs lived in villages, ate refuse, trash, and leftover food, sometimes a rat or a cat if they could catch it, and got plenty of daily caloric mass from dung, manure, and human fecal matter.
Most of the dogs that have ever lived, have lived outdoors.
Over the 17th through 20th century in the United States, those village dogs became neighborhood dogs and farm dogs. Somewhere in the mid-20th century, both the neighborhood and the farm dog started to become house dogs. The free-ranging dogs of the 50s were replaced by the 70s with dogs that lived inside fenced-in yards. The sexual restriction was good for reducing unwanted litters and overall neighborhood safety, but dogs don’t much like being restricted. It’s also not the best for them physically.
Dogs are built to scavenge, play, interact, and move freely, so that they can convince people to give them food and evade the dangers of the natural environment.
This is obviously not something that we can allow in the common era. Some people with large properties have free range dogs, but even they often put GPS trackers and electronic collars on their dogs in order to find them quickly.
Most of the dogs that live in suburban America today spend most of their time indoors. Most dogs aren’t even allowed to stay out in the yard very long. This isn’t necessarily a tragedy for the dog or the human, but it is a point of contention. The dog is not an indoor creature. Forcing it to live 22 hours a day indoors is going to create conflict within the place that it lives.
You must take an active role in your dog’s life to make sure that it gets enough of these things:
- Exercise. This is wildly dependent on the individual dog. Some dogs need four hours of exercise per day. Other dogs are happy and satisfied with an hour total broken up into a few small outings. You must know your dog.
- Time of exposure to various stimuli. If you want your dog to be calm around a variety of environmental stressors, like cars, heavy machinery, people, shouting, rain, and thunderstorms, you’re going to need to spend a lot of time exposing your dog to them. If your dog lives in the house 22 hours a day, it’s highly unlikely that during the one hour of walks that you take broken up throughout the day, you will see enough of those environmental stressors and to be able to combat them to a point of neutrality. Some of the most stable pet dogs I’ve observed have been dogs belonging to people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. They’re on the street, out in the world, in the environment, 18 hours a day; potentially 24 hours a day if they don’t have any shelter. Those dogs could care less about buses, cars, bicycles, skateboards, sounds, etc.
- Freedom to exhibit natural behavior. If your dog is living completely restricted, you need to make sure it has access to freely exhibit some of its natural behaviors such as sniffing and searching, digging, playing, chasing and catching things, or simply exploring new environments.
If you can find ways to add these three pieces into your house dog’s life, it will be much happier in the long run–and that will make you much happier.
