Let your dog sniff

Walking your dog - Use a long lead and let your dog sniff. Walking your dog is supposed to be about your dog and enriching your dog’s life, not about you. It shouldn’t be a military drill to teach your dog who’s boss or a competitive obedience exercise with your dog glued to your leg looking up at you the whole time.

The team at Ahimsa Dog Training compares asking a dog to not sniff during a walk to be the same as asking a person to walk around wearing a blindfold. Smell is a dog’s most important sense - dogs possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about five to six million in us. And the part of a dog's brain that is devoted to analysing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours.

Dogs' noses also function quite differently than our own. One can say dogs see their life through their nose. Research shows that letting your dog sniff on a walk offers huge benefits in terms of mental stimulation, enrichment, and choice resulting in a happier and healthier dog. One of the five Animal Welfare Needs states that an animal should be able to express natural behaviour patterns, which for dogs includes sniffing, exploring, and foraging.

Studies have shown that sniffing reduces your dog’s heart rate, burns energy, and being able to make choices gives your dog self-confidence and a feeling of self-reliance. Lack of freedom often leads to stress, anxiety, and depression, and a dog that shuts down.

It doesn’t have to mean that your dog pulls on lead though. On the contrary - in my experience, walking your dog on a longer lead and letting him sniff actually reduces a lot of nuisance behaviours such as pulling, barking and lunging at other dogs, frustration etc. It’s all about how you teach it.

Of course, there are times when your dog needs to walk right beside you, for example, when you’re on a busy walking track or a sidewalk. But it is easy to teach your dog to come to ‘heel position’ when you ask for it.

More and more internationally renowned science-based dog trainers and animal behaviourists are now advocating for walking your dog on a longer lead and letting them sniff. Watch out for my upcoming “Walking Together” courses where I will be incorporating these new lead-walking protocols.