There is no wild population of dogs that lives the way our dogs live. There are free-ranging dogs around villages and cities across the world, and they survive by staying close to human settlement, eating what we discard and tolerating our presence at distances no wolf would accept.
That is the animal we made: one whose entire strategy is proximity to us. It is worth holding that thought next to the arrangement we now ask of it, which is eleven hours a day in a sealed flat with nobody in it.
Selected for attention
Whatever the precise history, and it is still argued over, the direction of travel is not in doubt. Dogs became extraordinarily good at reading human beings: following a pointed finger, checking a human face when a problem cannot be solved, distinguishing between somebody who can see them and somebody who cannot.
They were also selected, over thousands of years, for jobs done beside us. Herding, guarding, retrieving, pulling, ratting, companionship. Every one of those is a partnership, performed in the presence of a person, with feedback from that person.
Almost nothing in that history selects for the capacity to spend most of a day alone doing nothing. It is not a flaw in individual dogs that they find it difficult. It is the predictable consequence of what they were built for.
We removed the skill of solitude from the species and then made solitude the central feature of the modern dog's day.
The obligation this creates
Not a sentimental one. A practical one, and it comes in three parts.
The first is that being alone has to be taught rather than assumed. It is a learned tolerance, built in minutes and then in hours, starting in the first week a dog arrives, and rebuilt whenever life changes. A household that never teaches it has not been unlucky; it has skipped a step.
The second is that the absence has a limit, and the limit is not set by our convenience. Whatever number a particular vet or behaviourist offers, and four to six hours is the range usually given for a healthy adult, the honest point is that the ordinary working day sits well beyond it, and the gap has to be filled by somebody.
The third is that what a dog does in our absence should occupy the parts of it we selected for. A nose with nothing to find and a brain with nothing to solve is not resting. It is idling, which is a different state and the one that produces everything owners complain about.
Against the two easy positions
One is that dogs are essentially wolves in a domestic setting and should be managed as such, with hierarchy and restraint. The genetics and the behaviour both fail to support it, and the practical advice that follows from it does real harm.
The other is that dogs are furry people who need what we need. They are not, and treating them as such produces animals that are indulged and unmet: given affection they cannot spend and denied the sniffing, chewing, sleeping and structure they can.
The accurate description sits between. Dogs are a species shaped specifically for life alongside humans, with needs of their own that are not ours and that were not removed by the shaping.
What follows in practice
It is the whole of this site, compressed. Break the day. Teach solitude deliberately. Give the nose something to do. Keep the routine predictable. Provide company often enough that absence is ordinary. Notice what the animal is telling you, because it was designed to notice what you are telling it.
None of that is generosity. It is the maintenance schedule for a machine we built, and then installed in an environment it was never specified for.
General information for dog owners in Luxembourg, not veterinary or legal advice. For your own dog, ask your vet, a qualified behaviourist or your commune. How this journal is written and checked.
Away from your dog all day?
PAWLY provides individual dog walks, home visits and overnight care in your own home, across Luxembourg City. Same walker every time, written report after every visit.
Keep reading
All Essays articles
The words we use about dogs
You cannot be angry at a sentence about distances.
The walk you do not feel like taking
The dog does not distinguish between the walks you enjoyed and the ones you endured.
Children, dogs and the supervision nobody does
The growl is not the beginning of the problem. It is the last polite stage of it.
