Exercise is Important
Health experts always stress the importance of regular exercise for us humans, so it should come as no surprise to learn that exercise is important for a dog’s health too. Regular exercise should start right from puppy stage and continue into old age. There are many benefits to be gained from starting a healthy exercise regime when your dog is young.
Puppies love to eat, and they will often eat too much for their own good, if allowed to. Regular exercise is not only fun for puppies, but it helps to prevent obesity, it strengthens your puppy’s cardiovascular health, and it can help enormously with house training too, as your puppy will quickly come to associate regular outdoor walks with toilet needs.
In dogs of all ages, regular exercise helps to maintain their optimal physical health, and it also helps to maintain their optimal mental well-being too. Dogs enjoy exercising. They love to run and explore, to fetch back a thrown ball or stick, or even just to walk quietly beside their owners. Regular exercise keeps a dog’s mind active, preventing depression, which can easily set in with a dog that gets little or no mental stimulation.
Veterinarians in the US report that around 30% of all the dogs they see are overweight – some even clinically obese. There are many health issues that can arise with an obese dog, including heart problems, back problems, breathing difficulties, arthritic problems due to joints being overburdened, and the dog’s risk of developing cancer is also significantly increased.
Your dog’s ancestor, the wolf, ate as much as it could every day, but it usually had to trek miles and miles in search of food. And when it found its prey, it usually had to run as fast as it could for maybe five minutes or so before catching the prey. Sometimes the intense effort was in vain and the prey managed to escape, meaning that the wolf had to go through the procedure of finding prey all over again. In this way, the wolf usually ate well, but it got plenty of exercise too, ensuring that it never got overweight. Wolves, by and large, stay healthy throughout their lives.
Regular exercise and a well-stimulated mind not only leads to a healthier dog, but it can help in solving many of the more common antisocial things your dog might do. Dogs who raid the garbage, chew the furniture, or bark or whine excessively are usually bored. The best cure for their boredom is to take them out for a walk. In fact, the more walks and play your dog has, the less likely he or she will be to do the things you disapprove of.
An adult dog should have at least one, and preferably two walks a day. Puppies can have increased exercise of five to 10 minutes for every month of age, twice a day. Feed your dog the right amount of balanced food each day, but combine it with plenty of fun exercise, and you will have a healthy dog that thoroughly enjoys life.
1. Pets spending time alone is part of the reason pets are increasingly obese.
2. Pets have needs; some need more attention than others. Some are fine being left for ten hours a day but then there are those who are starved for affection and have anxiety and are destructive.
3. When people are bored, depressed or lonely they overeat, see the correlation with animals. There seems to be a connection those animals that are deprived emotionally in some way and their overweightness.
4. Though we need more exercise, it is the burning of calories that count. Animals that lose weight with exercise and diet are probably doing it because they are getting the interaction and stimulation and don’t have to eat to make up for that.
