Regular dog walking is likely a symbiotic relationship between the needs of the dog and its owner. This relationship has seen limited attention.
(Lim and Rhodes 2016, 65)
For many people, outdoor activity is often done together with dogs. In Scotland, for example, a 2012–2013 survey of adults found not only that almost half of visits to the outdoors (48 percent) were accompanied by a dog, but also that in the previous 10 years the overall proportion of outdoor visits accompanied by a dog had increased from 41 percent to 48 percent (SNH 2014). For such people, dogs are central to their (typically daily) outdoor leisure experience, and in turn to their wellbeing (Johnson, Beck and McCune 2011), which dog walking is found to enhance physically (Cutt et al. 2007), mentally (Clark Cline 2010), socially (Antonacopoulos, Duvall and Pychyl 2014) and even spiritually (Boisvert and Harrell 2014).
Some of these studies also identify key motivations and barriers to dog walking and thus some of the contingencies of the associated wellbeing benefits. Yet arguably more is understood about the positive correlation between dog walking and human wellbeing than the processes through which the generation of such wellbeing depends. Westgarth and colleagues (2014, 11) highlight that “there has been little explicit research as to what dog walking actually is, to both the owner and the dog; what actually happens on a ‘dog walk’ and what functions it performs”. One intriguing area requiring further exploration is how the wellbeing needs of humans intertwine with the wellbeing needs of dogs in the spaces of a dog walk. The positive associations between dog ownership and physical activity are found to “hinge on human – animal bonds, and thus on people’s commitment to meet the physical and emotional needs of dogs” (Rock et al. 2014, 980). Moreover, Cutt et al. (2008) found that people were more motivated to walk their dog for the dog’s health and wellbeing than their own.
Yet little is understood about how notions of what dogs want and need from a dog walk, as perceived by guardians, actually infuse and shape dog walking practices and related management. The literature conveys a general appreciation that dogs require regular exercise in alignment with their size, age, breed and energy levels (Lim and Rhodes 2016) and that dog walkers will usually be motivated to seek out opportunities for their dogs to be off-leash (Cutt et al. 2007; Westgarth et al. 2014). However, this work tends not to deal so much with the details of what guardians think qualitatively matters in making a dog walk enhancing to the dog’s wellbeing. As Rock et al. (2014, 980) state, “[f]uture research could delve deeper into how caring for pet dogs influences physical activity for owners and other people … [and] … consider the extent to which meeting a pet’s emotional and physical needs may contribute positively to a sense of self-efficacy”, since self-efficacy is positively associated with dog-walking (Richards et al. 2013). Neither does it deal with how humans come to ‘know’ their dog’s needs and preferences (Brown and Dilley 2012; Brown 2015). Nor do they tend to ponder the implications for how dog walking co-generates human and canine – and indeed broader social and ecological – wellbeing. Such knowledge could be useful in addressing issues of inadequate dog walking, given that many dogs are thought to be given insufficient exercise and training (British Veterinary Association 2017) and that many dog owners are still not getting the physical activity recommended in official health guidelines (Christian et al. 2013).
This chapter helps to address this gap by expanding on how perceived canine wellbeing matters in the leisure experience surrounding dog walking. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of outdoor recreation (including with dogs) in the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland which took place between 2008–2016 using mainly mobile and video methods, the chapter explores how dogs’ needs and desires come to be “known” and experienced by their guardians in relation to dog walking (and indeed running, biking, skiing and swimming), and how this matters for dog walking practices, as well as how this intersects with human wellbeing. The findings prompt broader questions of whether dogs have leisure rights, and, moreover, if they do what form these should take (e.g. to what kind of outings ought dogs be entitled?), and the possible implications for multispecies wellbeing if canine wellbeing was taken more seriously in (more-than-) human leisure, management and health promotion.
The wellbeing dogs are thought to get from a walk has been identified as a factor shaping the motivation for, incidence and duration of, dog walking (e.g. Oka and Shibata 2012; Richards et al. 2013; Westgarth et al. 2014). Furthermore, the intervention studies of Rhodes et al. (2012) suggest that targeting dog rather than human needs from dog walking may be a good approach to health promotion. However, more needs to be known about the particular aspects of canine health that are most persuasive and effective in this regard (Westgarth et al. 2014)
Many researchers frame a guardian’s concern for canine wellbeing through dog walking as a sense of duty, obligation or responsibility, often coupled with perceived exercise needs (e.g. Brown and Rhodes 2006; Oka and Shibata 2012). Some identify this concern as a function of attachment and social interaction (Westgarth, Christley and Christian 2014; Lim and Rhodes 2016) where the stronger the dog-human relationship the more motivating the sense of obligation is to walk the dog more often and for longer. Others have expanded notions of guardian wellbeing concern even further to conceive of dog walking as a practice of care (Degeling and Rock 2012; Degeling et al. 2016; Fletcher and Platt 2016). Here more conceptual space is made for the dog walk as wanted, needed and co-performed by both dog and human; not something that is simply done by the human for the dog.
Yet, beyond this, there is still relatively little understanding of the relationships interlinking the perceived canine wellbeing associated with dog walks – whether anticipated or interpreted – to actual dog walking practices and their co-generation of human wellbeing, including the many possible factors, processes, nuances and circumstances of importance. We still need deeper knowledge of from what exactly it is about dog walks that guardians think or feel their dog will gain wellbeing, how this is negotiated in relation to the experience they themselves desire, and how that shapes their dog walking practices. In particular we need to know more about the nature and distribution of agency guardians ascribed to particular environments, features of environments, objects and technologies, as well as the guardians themselves and other humans, in making the dog walk conducive to canine wellbeing, and how this influences the spatialities, duration, experience and interactivity of the dog walk. This would help build a more relational understanding of the “many dynamic aspects of the networks of care that surround a dog” that Degeling and Rock (2012, 405) assert are central to making sense of dog walking practices and how they produce health.
Post-humanist theory would conceive of the dog walk as inextricably embedded within continually becoming, multiplicitous, human-nonhuman relations of articulation and response. For example, Haraway (2003) emphasises human and canine co-agency as she describes in depth the process of person and dog ‘training-together’, in which both partners increasingly attune to and care about how they articulate to, and respond to, each other through repeated practices of attuning and becoming significant to one another. Similarly, Despret (2004) conceives of animal and human as partners actively making and transforming each other through their mutual availability and affect.
Such more-than-human relating can also involve broader ecologies and highlight the agency of the environment in activating dog wellbeing. Brown (2015), for example, found that some dog walkers purposely sought ‘wild’ landscapes through which to let their dog ‘run wild’ as they felt a ‘wild’ or ‘wolf-like’ dimension of their dog needed to be fulfilled, or that they had to walk somewhere ‘interesting’ to fully realise the ‘dogness’ of the dog (see also Fletcher and Platt 2016). Jenkinson (2017) identifies one of the key “Specifications for Dog Walking Friendly Sites” as “[b]ushes, trees, long grass and smells of wildlife to provide stimulation for [the] dog” (1) and the desirability of activity trails for dogs, dog training areas, and adequate areas for dogs to run off-leash. Jenkinson also stated that
[p]eople who took their dogs to urban woodlands and other green spaces described how much their dogs enjoyed exercising off-lead, running freely, stimulated by a natural environment. Seeing their dogs enjoy themselves in this way gave the owners a great sense of wellbeing and enjoyment for the owners.
(3)
Thus, there are questions of how concerns of canine stimulation interweave with a guardian’s priorities for gaining their own restorative effects from the dog walk, whether it be physical exertion, being in nature, social interaction with other humans, sense of community or interaction with the dog (Cutt et al. 2007). Ultimately, if human wellbeing from dog walking, and indeed canine wellbeing from dog walking, is contingent upon perceptions of the latter, as studies suggest, then we need to investigate further how such more-than-human relations are co-performed and their ethical implications.
The chapter is based on an ethnographic study of outdoor access and recreation conducted in the Cairngorms National Park from 2006 to 2016, employing a range of qualitative methods, including interviews, videos and observation. Dog walking practices were explored mainly through “walk along” interview techniques and minicam video-recorded outings with 30 individual dog walkers, as well as 14 land, conservation and recreation managers (see Brown and Banks 2014, for a more detailed elaboration of the method). Dog walkers participating in the study encompassed both residents and visitors to the Park, but the focus in this chapter is on residents. The visual and discursive material was subject to thematic and performative analysis, and was especially attentive to the relationship between the bodily practices and experiences of people and dogs, and the discursive practices surrounding them.
Employing video allowed human–nonhuman engagements (including their more fleeting, non-verbal and taken-for-granted dimensions, see Lorimer 2010; Laurier, Maze and Lundin 2006) to be made visible, as well as how they unfolded in relation to specific ecologies and materialities. Such interactions were then made available for contextualisation and the development of further layers of meaning-making in post-outing interviews where the footage was used as a prompt to discussion. It was then possible to examine how notions of canine and human wellbeing became interwoven with the agencies of environments, objects, humans and animals to work materially and semiotically to enable and sustain particular practices of dog walking.
It was found that the needs and desires of dogs – as articulated and perceived by their significant human others, and always negotiated in relation to the latter’s human needs and desires – played a key role in motivating dog walking practices and shaping how they unfolded in terms of: the nature and degree of handler-dog interaction; the type of environments sought; the socialities sought in terms of proximity to or interaction with other dogs and people and; how a leash or other objects (e.g. toys or a muzzle) were enrolled. Each will be discussed in turn.
Virtually all human participants in the study said or implied that they controlled and dictated the terms of the dog walk. For example, Penny1 emphasised that “we’re the ones that take them for the walk and tell them where they’re going to go”. Laura went further to suggest that one of her dogs had no particular preferences, “You don’t care Bailey do you”. Yet each human-dog partnership also indicated a plethora of ways in which the dog, by actively expressing its requirements and predilections, shaped both the instigation of the dog walk, and how, where, when and with whom the walk unfolded. In numerous ways dogs showed their guardians not only that “they need walking” (Megan) but also the kind of walking they need (e.g. “you get used to your own dog and what your own dog likes and doesn’t like sort of thing” (Penny)).
Haraway (2003) notes that dogs have preferences, many of which will be expressed through their behaviour and body language, but which are not necessarily ‘heard’ or responded to by their ‘significant other’ humans. Crucially, in this study, the characteristics of the dog walk depended on how humans understood and responded to these articulations of the dog. Degeling and Rock (2012) found that guardians tried to tailor their walks to their assessment of dogs’ interests, preferences and needs, but did not expand on how participants thought they ‘knew’ their dog’s needs and preferences. Thus, the dog’s ‘voice’ was rather silent, despite their alignment with post-humanist thought.
This study found that dogs were felt by their guardians to ‘speak’ in myriad ways central to the dog walk, before, travelling to, during and after the outing. Through their bodily movements, gestures, facial expressions, sounds, tactility, enrolment of objects in particular ways (e.g. toys, leads, sticks), leaving of traces (e.g. poo, door scratches, chewed objects) and the sheer intensity or reiteration of these activities (or indeed through their absence), dogs invited their humans to sense and respond to the articulations of their dog walking desires, and in influential ways. Effective ways of dogs getting their human out of the house included waiting at the door, sustained eye contact, making ‘big eyes’, licking, putting their head in the human’s lap, following, jumping up, barking. For some humans there was a promise of fun and a deep joy in witnessing the dog’s joyful anticipation. For Megan the enthusiasm is infectious, “I like looking at the dog, I like watching him bounce-bounce about, be all waggy and stuff”.
During outings dogs often seemed to make humans take notice by using movement and body language to express what they like to sniff, look at, immerse themselves in, follow and chase, and by seeking out particular activities. For example, Olivia notices that her dog becomes particularly absorbed in the scents close to the car park and responds to the dog’s reluctance to be rushed through this part of the walk, “[as dog sniffs fervently] I think the entrance of the woods is the most exciting spot for dogs. Checking in and checking out!”. The sought activities included: swimming and paddling (in a pond, river or puddles):
“the water always makes him hyper!” (Cara)
“Come on Rosie! Every puddle!” (Patrick)
finding, digging up, carrying items such as sticks and even stones:
“Usually it’s like, ‘mum there’s a huge stone here!’ We can just see this like proud look on his face and a kind of wag wag wag wag! ‘It’s here! It’s here! It’s so big it can’t even fit in my mouth!’ ”
(Megan)
rolling (on particular textures, such as heather, in particular smells, especially wildlife scat, livestock poo or fish guttings):
“he goes a wee bit crazy for deer scat … and then he’s [big smile]”
(Lindsey)
which is an example of dog happiness with which Lindsey is less happy, and will change her route to avoid whilst there is a particularly bad favourite ‘smelly’ spot; and, chasing. Dogs often show that they love to chase other creatures but different guardians took different tacks regarding how chasing might affect canine wellbeing. Some turned a blind eye to, or actively facilitated, their dog having a little chase. Penny assured me Molly would never catch anything and “the fun is in the chase … it’s a strong instinct”, and Fiona similarly felt the dogs enjoyed a good rabbit chase, conveyed with a glee echoing the perceived canine glee and the disclaimer that “they [rabbits] are just vermin anyway”. However, others (such as Megan, Lindsey) worked hard to anticipate and intervene before any chasing desire was activated, worried about the dog’s wellbeing in the more fundamental sense of not being run over by a car or shot by a farmer.
Dogs could be skilled in conveying the practices for which they had most passion and endurance. Cara translated what her dog was trying to tell me about his sustained appetite for retrieving sticks from the river through his pricked ear, stare and one-leg-up poise, “That’s a ‘please more throw’, that … he can do it for ages”. Conversely, dogs sometimes indicated when they wanted the walk to slow or stop. Patrick noted his ageing dog increasingly wanted the walk to be over as he now tended to speed up in a homeward direction. Cara’s dog had a joint condition to which she was particularly alive and often changed her route accordingly: “Yeah there you go you squeaked! [with pain] … Come on then you let’s keep you on the flat”. Dogs also exerted agency in route choice directly at times. When I asked Penny if she usually walks a planned route, she replied “No I improvise as I go along” and explained how the dog sometimes decides which track to take at a junction. More than anything dogs were thought to signal adequate dog walking by being ‘settled’, ‘mellow’, ‘tired’ or ‘sleepy’ afterwards: “I always try and take her out first thing, that’s one of the things we’ve always done and it just settles her down for the day” (Penny).
However, such dog articulations were responded to variously depending on the human in question, with wellbeing implications for both partners.
For some of the human participants, an enjoyable walk was contingent upon having a minimum degree of influence or ‘control’ over the dog. Some felt they got a sufficient sense of control from using a lead (e.g. Andrew, Laura, Patrick, Hannah, Jacob). Others wanted more. For them, an enjoyable walk was an interactive walk, with dog and human actively enjoying each other, and building and affirming a relationship with one another (e.g. Megan, Penny, Lindsey). In contrast, others still saw the human’s role as little more than taking the dog to a sufficiently interesting environment and/or facilitating its physical exercise through their physical proximity and pace-making (e.g. Cara, Kirsty, Greg). One reason for this disparity could be that the more interactive approach echoes what Haraway (2003) calls ‘training-together’, which takes huge amounts of time and effort; an ongoing investment in weaving in with the dog continuous layers of human attending – tendering invitation and responding – before and during each dog walk for months and years.
Some (most notably Lindsey and Megan) relished the opportunity dog walking presented for such dog-human relationship-building and emphasised how much it added to the wellbeing and satisfaction they got from walking with dogs: “I totally enjoy him enjoying it [the interaction]”. Lindsey feels strongly that Buddy has a mode of enjoyment beyond free play:
I think he enjoys it as well, he likes the challenge and if we can um … take him out, you can see him sort of learning, and he’s like what’s next, what’s next? Right okay we’re doing something rather than … I think when he’s out walking and he’s like on you go, out and free walking and he’s just like dah-de-dah-de-dah, follow my nose, what’s that over there? And then as soon as you give him a command he’s like oh right okay we’re going to do something here. So it’s nice just to switch him back on and keep him alert and attentive. And it might be a ball gets thrown or I might have already thrown a ball, told him to wait … it’s just he uses … it gets his brain working really. It’s nice to have a wee bit of a play both [of us].
Buddy’s continued rapt engagement is taken as a sign that Lindsey is not the only one experiencing a kind of joy at two-way mutual attending. She is aligned here with Hearne (cited in Haraway 2003, 52) for whom the happiness of companion animals is “the capacity for satisfaction that comes from striving, from work, from fulfilment of possibility … bringing out what is within”. This frames wellbeing in terms of satisfaction-through-achievement more than happiness.
There were also echoes of Haraway’s (2003) discussion of how dogs and humans come to be important to, and care about, one another through the power of their mutual affect. Megan saw a core part of her role in dog walking to be more interesting and ‘attractive’ than all the various distractions that could threaten the coherence of their more-than-human ‘conversation’ and the related safety and joy that came from it. She explained that once, when an out-of-control dog (Bruno) was trying to tempt Rocky away by teasing him with a ball, “I picked up a stick, I had to be more exciting than Bruno with a ball with this stick, you know”. Being deserving of the dog’s attention was something humans talked of gaining through ‘hard work’ and a ‘learning curve’, involving games, drills and rewards. Lindsey described how Buddy came to increasingly care where she was: “we played a lot of hide ‘n’ seek as well so … he didn’t want to go too far away because he never knew where we were going to be”. For Lindsey and Buddy it was clear that dog freedom and wellbeing hinged upon effective training-together, and that ‘work’ with dogs was too rewarding to be the sole domain of ‘working dogs’, challenging notions of dog-based leisure as necessarily involving certain kinds of freedom. These humans felt that their playing with boundaries gave a mutual trust and security that allowed dogs and humans enjoy more freedoms when out walking together.
Alternately, other guardians did not relish the relationship-building elements of dog walking. Megan saw such guardians as having more of a human-oriented agenda, prioritising their own physical or mental health, rather than the experience of the dog:
say you’ve had a tough day and you’re going out and you need to switch off … because if you’re going to stomp out in the forest, right I’m going out for a walk, oh I’ll take the dog because I’m going out because I need to go out. I need to go out because I need to focus on getting my head back to where it needs to be in order to come back in and carry on with whatever I was dealing with. And then you know some people are just like dragging the dog out with them because that’s what they do and so they’re not going to be thinking about um … concentrating on what’s going to be happening with the dog you know, the dog is secondary to the person’s purpose of being out and about.
(Megan)
Going out with some participants backed up the idea that some people were more into making the dog ‘fit in’ to their own outdoor ambitions (e.g. when they described the list of places they wanted to see, exercise they needed to take to get/stay fit and friends they needed to catch up with almost to the exclusion of any dog-based outing requirements) or were sometimes just ticking the box of ‘taking the dog out’. Interestingly too, the material suggested that guardians foregrounding their own health needs in terms of physical fitness tended also to frame their dog’s needs as primarily physical, rather than mental or social. This begs the question of dog walking as an act of care for whom, and in which ways?
It was clear that guardians sought particular kinds of environments and routes to enhance the wellbeing gained from the dog walk, with a far more sophisticated geography than merely seeking somewhere ‘off-lead’, and it was very difficult to disentangle human and canine wellbeing. Specific places were often described as particularly interesting to the dog, in terms of its general character (e.g. rugged, natural or wild, somewhere to ‘get a good run’) and/or specific features (e.g. water, good smells, vegetation, things to chase, secure fencing). But if the human did not want the dog to engage with interesting features, the fact both were familiar with a particular route and its canine ‘crux points’ meant the human could anticipate circumstances that could rupture the coherence of their relationship (see also Brown and Dilley 2012) and keep the outing ‘lower stress’ (David). Nevertheless, virtually all participants wanted some variety and did a range of ‘favourite’ routes within the week.
Some environments were thus felt more conducive to human-dog play or coherence. For example, there were participants who preferred the moorland to the forest, or the birchwood to the pinewood, in each case because of the better sightlines and finding greater security, and therefore relaxation in being able to “see them [the dogs] most of the time” (Hannah), “know when she might try to run away” (Penny), and therefore be able to anticipate unwanted encounters with wildlife or other people and dogs, “can’t just attack my dog by surprise” (Julie). For others, such as Laura, taking away these stimulations would make it ‘more boring’ too. Like others, she felt the woods were most exciting for dogs, though wavered in her explanation between facets of human and canine wellbeing:
I could stick to the moor and I wouldn’t necessarily need to come into the woods at all but it’s not such a great walk for them … I suppose another option for me but we like coming into the woods. We like … it’s a walk and it’s a longer walk, and so from a health perspective I suppose I know it’s better for me to do an hour and a half walking in the woods in the morning than do three-quarters of an hour over the moor … [but] I suppose they get more smells in the wood than they would do so they get a change of smell … there is something nice about walking through the woods and there is always the prospect of seeing something [wildlife], that you certainly aren’t going to see on the moor because the moor is so open … it’ll see you before you’re anywhere … near it.
Here the human feels the need for exercise and the chance of seeing some wildlife and is grappling with how this supports or diverges from possible dog-needs. Laura goes on to add that she wants to go somewhere more secluded for ‘thinking time’ (see next section). In this and other instances, the environment (mainly the pinewoods) was mobilised as a relative release from dog-human interaction. Here the dog could be easily exercised and stimulated as they “find their own entertainment” (Dave) – commonly taking the form of following scents and tracking wildlife (mainly rabbits and squirrels) – which freed up the human to be able to “unwind and relax” (Sal) and be “busy with my own thoughts” (Alec).
Dog walking practices in the study were clearly driven by the social needs of both dog and guardian. Penny exemplified well what Antonacopoulos, Duvall and Pychyl (2014) found about dog walking serving the human desire to make and meet up regularly with friends – “it’s good to meet people now I’m not working” – and what Degeling and Rock (2012) found about adapting the walk purposely to the socialisation needs of the dog: “we take her to things, and walk her around places where there are other dogs”. Though I would go further here to suggest that one was inextricably linked to the other. In Penny’s case, her dog had been rescued and had issues with aggression towards other dogs. Penny’s response was to purposely orchestrate walks to seek out other dog walkers and work on training-together to make their encounter less fraught, sometimes enrolling the help of particular objects, notably ball, lead and muzzle: “I had to put a bit of work in certainly but uh … you know she’s very good now, if she’s a see dog she’ll sit down which is great because that means I can catch hold of her and put her on the lead”. She (Penny) and a good friend started working on their dog walking together as “a sort of social activity”. But why so much effort? From our sessions together it became clear that interaction with other humans was a crucial facet of dog walking for Penny and in many ways she could not ‘afford’ (in terms of her human social wellbeing needs) a dog who could not mingle with others, especially as she was now retired, so the priority was to “socialise with her [the dog]”.
Penny’s behaviour contrasted markedly with the majority of other participants in a similar position with ‘difficult’ dogs who took the opposite tactic of avoidance, and said they preferred to meet no-one. Ascribing reasons for such avoidance to enhancing wellbeing in the human versus the dog was rarely clear-cut. Some participants articulated clearly how their mental health needs involved some “alone time” (Sal), usually in the further, denser part of the woodland. Patrick too was emphatic that “I walk the dogs and don’t want to meet people, … I just get some head space really”. Like Patrick, Laura has a full-time job and hectic routine, and says the principal factor dictating her dog walking route is “just purely not to meet people, and I suppose it’s a feel good thing because I like being out on a walk, it’s my thinking time”. It turns out that her young dog is “not so good with other people and dogs” so it is “much more relaxing” to go somewhere “you don’t have to worry about others” with “interesting tracks and smells” where the dogs “leave you alone” and “get a good run”. Here the quality of the dog walking becomes more reliant on the agency of the environment to provide social seclusion for humans and stimulation and exercise for dogs.
As in previous studies, the pursuit of off-leash dog walking opportunities was central to most guardians’ daily or weekly outing strategy. Most participants felt that their dog’s wellbeing hinged on the experience of ‘freedom’ and having sufficient opportunity to ‘run free’ or “run with the pack” (Lindsey). Penny emphasised that “they [dogs] need to run. They need the exercise”, which was always associated with being off-leash, as illustrated by Laura who said “I don’t feel that the dogs are getting a proper walk if they’re on a lead”. However, there were different and sometimes complex ways of (dis)enrolling a leash in dog walking in order to generate or maintain human and canine wellbeing. For some humans, they needed some off-leash time to experience freedom at least as much as their dog did: “if he’s on the lead I have to concentrate all the time and we’re getting all tangled in the trees. And sometimes I need to get a good run in myself” (Rob) and “especially after work I just need to clear my head, decompress” (Alice).
But for others, they could not really switch off unless their dog was on a lead, indicating that they, like Olivia, “like to be in control”. Patrick keeps his dog on a long lead all the time unless on a beach or other ‘safe’ area:
it just reduces any stress on me to be honest and I think also I think it would probably reduce the stress on the dogs because if they got themselves into a situation they’d either injure themselves or injure something else and then … the repercussions from that could be quite bad…. It’s about controlling the things you can control and getting rid of the things you can’t control.
His partner added, “I feel bad for them, it would be nice to see them run around but they … they are either badly trained or uncontrollable! [Laughter]”. Likewise, Andrew feels his dogs get most freedom on a long lead as they can go a little bit off the path without him having to worry: “If they were off the lead in here then I would be wondering where they were…. They would tear off”. He is also aware that his concentration is often on other human concerns: “[I’m usually] plotting … everyone has issues in their life somewhere…. You find yourself rehearsing your arguments … you do a lot of thinking”.
It is interesting how both camps enrol similar narratives of human stress yet different prevailing narratives of dog wellbeing – as maximised by being ‘free’ versus being kept out of harm’s way – which produced divergent dog walking practices. Often those finding on-leash most relaxing had previously had a bad experience off-leash, in some cases fatal. Another factor affecting both on/off-leash practices was the co-agency of dog-lead-human in terms of whether and how much the dog ‘pulled’, which in turn depended on training-together. Megan was unusual in being relaxed whether her dog was on or off lead, since he did not pull and his recall was ‘solid’ Penny conversely explained how pulling affected her route choice: “we always try to make it possible that she goes off [leash] fairly quickly yeah, yeah. So … she’s not that bad on the lead, she doesn’t pull that much, but you do get dogs that do”. The riverside route being promoted to take people away from the sensitive wildlife zone was therefore less pleasant for Penny because of the agency of her dog pulling: “it means that you’ve got to start off walking up the road and I personally like her to run when she first goes out”.
This study illustrates the importance of considering not only what companion animals get out of human-animal leisure practices, but also how their significant other humans come to ‘know’ this, and how such knowledges become negotiated with the pursuit of human wellbeing needs, desires and priorities to shape those leisure practices. Only by considering dog walking as an activity in which notions and experiences of human and canine wellbeing are inextricably linked can we have the deeper understanding of the motivations for dog walking called for by Westgarth and colleagues (2015). Given that humans and dogs have co-existed and co-evolved with each other for thousands of years, as Haraway (2003) underlines, it perhaps should come as no surprise that their ability to thrive is so intertwined with each other.
The findings illustrate some important contingencies regarding how the wellbeing of dog and human are co-generated through dog walking, particularly about how the burden of agency in producing wellbeing can be distributed between humans, dogs, environment and technology (e.g. a leash), and how this varies from one partnership to another. Much depends on how the dog is able to express its preferences in relation to dog walking and, moreover, how their human ‘hears’ and is affected by these articulations, especially when at the same time they are being affected by their own human wellbeing needs and desires. Sometimes it was challenging to discern whether a dog’s wellbeing needs were being ‘heard’ or whether they were reframed human wellbeing desires (e.g. no dog aims to have ‘exercise’ per se). In other cases it was clearer that decisions had been taken over how much to enrol the agency of human versus environment, or human versus leash, in enhancing the dog’s wellbeing. Notions of a dog’s ‘freedom’ or ‘protection’ (through ‘control’) were mobilised differently (sometimes, but not always at odds with each other, depending on the human’s commitment to training-together with the dog and the nature and intensity of their own wellbeing needs) and thus led to differences in where and how dog walking was done. Building on Degeling and Rock (2012), future work could fruitfully explore the management implications stemming from the range of ways in which dog walking can be co-constituted as a practice of care.
Thinking about how to take these insights forward, we must be aware that, at present, most of the debate surrounding dog walking and wellbeing is framed almost wholly in terms of what dogs (and their need for walks) can do for humans, reflecting the humanist orientation of health promotion noted by Rock and Degeling (2013). Certainly the findings presented in this chapter allow us to argue for a recentring of companion animal agency in understanding leisure experiences and management. But do we also need to use these insights to help think through the kind of dog walking experiences to which a dog may be entitled (e.g. which places, with whom, which kinds of human, canine and ecological interactions)? If we are taking animal agency seriously – as individuals as well as species – then being prescriptive may be neither possible nor desirable. As Haraway (2003) states, “[t]his kind of happiness is about yearning for excellence and having the chance to reach it in terms recognisable to concrete beings, not to categorical abstractions…. The specificity of their happiness matters” (Haraway 2003, 52).
A question underpinning this book is whether domestic species such as dogs have leisure rights? I would qualify this question further by asking whether domestic species have the right to particular ways of doing leisure, perhaps to the enrolment of particular more-than-human agencies? In one sense this invokes the question raised by Carr (2014) of: does a dog have a right to unstructured, free play? But we could equally ask does a dog have a right to the “disciplined spontaneity” (Haraway 2003, 62) of play generated through training-together? If we subscribe to the view that leisure has the notion of freedom at its heart, it is interesting to note that the dog-human partnerships that seemed to enjoy the most freedom and restoration from their dog walking were also those that had worked the hardest at it, thus troubling any easy work-leisure binary. Indeed, I would argue that we need to take care when asserting that domestic animals need leisure as if in opposition to work, since any experience they have of freedom may come from something more like work, more like training, intra-action and human and animal learning to attend better to one another.
We could give more serious consideration to dog walking as one of many forms of cross-species acts of ‘getting along together’ discussed by Haraway. For Haraway (2003), following Hearne, the rights of dogs cannot be served by any simple extension of human rights; “the origin of rights is in committed relationship, not in separate and pre-existing category identities. Therefore, in training, dogs obtain ‘rights’ in specific humans. In relationship, dogs and humans construct ‘rights’ in each other, such as the right to demand respect, attention and response” (53–54). In this she emphasises how dogs obtain from their human something akin to an expectation and entitlement to particular forms of human attention and response as part of a reciprocal exchange of their own attention and response to the human. More than a bestowal of rights upon dogs to standardise adequate dog walking, dogs need us to consider more deeply the role of a human on a dog walk, and people might do better in constructing rights together with dogs by building a more genuinely reciprocal communication. If “(d)ogs’ survival … depends on their reading humans well” (Haraway 2003, 50) then mutual wellbeing from dog walking could involve humans taking a greater burden of agency insofar as learning to better ‘hear’ and respond to what dogs are telling us.
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