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> A mile a day is not enough for a big dog. Big dogs need regular activity, preferably throughout the day.

This applies to working dogs (which is what an aussie shepherd is), not big dogs.

> Failure to exercise a large dog properly leads to bad behavior, which is hard to correct

This is correct

> because they _really want something to do_. So many people, not providing enough training nor enough job for their dog resort to using harnesses and other restraints when in public, and then when they have company over the dogs are reactive until they are put in the place where they can be out of the way.

This is arriving at the wrong diagnosis. Yes, a tired dog is a happy dog and not exercising your dog enough will lead to all sorts of issues, but reactivity (what you're describing) is not addressed by merely working your dog out more. If your dog is showing reactivity, rarely is it just a lack of exercise.

> I strongly feel most people with large dogs, especially in suburbs and cities, are doing those animals a disservice

A dog can be effectively exercised via a combination of physical activity and exercising their nose. It's widely observed that ~20min of sniffing exhausts a dog as much as ~60min of hard physical exercise. This is one of the first things a competent dog trainer will teach you with regards to exercise - if you're busy, hide a treat and send the dog searching. There are also, plenty of jobs you can teach a dog to keep them busy around the house, for example, fastidiousness. Teach a dog it's their job to ensure certain items are in a certain place at all times, and it will keep them mentally engaged throughout the day. This is ofcourse much easier done with some breeds (Akitas for example) than others.

Our lab totally preferred "searching for the treat" exercise way more than "run around" exercise :-)

The killer though was while camping and taking him on a hike for 5 miles and him sniffing all the sniffs? Totally wiped him out.

Our (yellow) lab too. Her daily exercise was an hour long walk in the woods followed by 20-30 minutes at the dog park near the woods; and any activity post that was just following my mom around the house. But on rainy or snowy days where we couldn't take her out, the "search for the treat" or "kitchen floor patrol during dinner prep" seemed to engage her just fine.

She broke down towards the end (hip issues) but managed 13 years before taking a final nap. I miss her dearly.

try that with a coonhound and tracking training. 3+ hours nose work and the dog is fine but I am dragging my ass through the fields (damm you comfy office chair). Drive an hour home, the doggo is zzzzzzzzing away in the back seat so that when we get home she is rested and ready for a snufflewalk though the neighborhood.

I've been working with a trainer for our bichon frise (small dog) and they taught me this exact thing about the sniffing, which I've been trying to do more of. The dog are still reactive when visitors come to our home or they see other dogs on walks but making progress..

With my screen width, your post word-wrapped at

> ~20min of sniffing exhausts

which led to some weird imagery.

The dog would get sleepy, just not for good reasons.

Sniffing is giving the doggie neural net as much work to do as complex text reading does for ours, I always assume. People can get tired from a fully sedentary day if they’re doing mental work.

The universe of smell data that humans are blind to is fully stimulating to dogs.

I let my late pug dogs sniff every pole they came across while out and about until they were no longer interested. From what I understood they could get an idea of dogs in the area, what their age/sex (breed perhaps), get a real mental map of the area.

During their golden years I would take them out in the car at least once a day to some part of a neighborhood they'd never been to as I figured it filled them with all sorts of interesting 'experiences' even if they could only manage a few blocks.

"It's widely observed that ~20min of sniffing exhausts a dog as much as ~60min of hard physical exercise."

Is a snuffle mat sufficient.

I think it's better than nothing, but probably not equivalent to something like scent training. The way my dog breaths when searching for a scent is really pretty crazy. Imagine trying to inhale sharply twice a second. Just performing the physical act is tiring for me.

If you haven't tried scent training, I highly recommend it. There's plenty of information online about it and it's really simple. You can even take a dog treat, put it in front of your dog, and say "find it." Keep moving the treat back until you get it out of sight. Then move on to hiding it in the couch, etc. My dog can find a tiny, 1 cm square of rubber in a huge grassy field. It's impressive.

That’s a working dog thing, not a large dog thing. A buddy of mine (a vet, actually) has 3 Great Danes that are total couch potatoes. There are plenty of large dogs that were bred for companionship and maybe a bit of light guarding.

Greyhounds are another… yes they can run incredibly fast for a half mile or so… and then they’re done. No stamina at all.

I can't help but chuckle a little bit when I'm out on the NYC streets with my dog and we pass a great dane - such great temperament for small apartments, such a wildly awkward size for small apartments

I keep threatening to dog nap one of his. About my favorite temperament of any dog. One of his bonded to me at first sight, and basically doesn’t leave my side on the rare occasion I get to visit in person (he lives 5 hours away).

I have a Mastiff/St Bernard/Lab cross and she's quite happy to chase a stick a couple times and then carry it home.

Alright that was fun, can we go back to napping?

Correct, that is a working dog point. A caveat to that is that the word "job" is different when used with dogs. It means repeated activity that they have access to. Some examples: https://www.labradortraininghq.com/simply-the-rest/jobs-for-...

My pit/greyhound mix has all the behaviors of a working dog. She likes routine, she'll herd you if she wants something, and she can run for miles for fun without breaking a sweat. She has security around the yard and the house, though it took a while to train her to replacing barking with pointing and to not engage in obnoxious/hazardous behavior while doing security. She does still need play time on top of that, but she'll bring you the rope when she's ready.

heh, because dogs don’t sweat (except through their paws, iirc)

We've got a greyhound cross... about 80% of the speed, 300% of the endurance of an OG Grey. Still is absolutely done for the day after his morning hour at the beach. Doesn't spark back up until about 8hrs later.

Not to disparage your experience but it sounds like you're warning people about the reality of owning a work-directed breed, not a large dog. Small hunting dogs are equally miserable stuck in apartments all day. My little Podengo can go on 4-hour hikes without tiring.

Folks, don't get working dogs if you don't have a job for them to do.

Where are we drawing the 'working dog' line?

Does a Labrador retriever count? Terriers?

Yes, a Labrador requires a lot of daily exercise and is more similar to a working dog. A Great Dane, though — which is much larger, but not a working dog — requires very minimal exercise. But Great Danes have very short lifespans; on average they die between 7-10 years old.

I'm hopeful that LOY-001 works (the article even specifically calls put Great Danes as a research target); I'd love to have a Great Dane since they're so easy-going, but the thought of losing one after such a short time has put me off.

My point was that labradors are ridiculously popular, you are not going to stop people getting them because they don't have retrieval work for them to do. And that's mostly fine, a lab that gets a 30-40m walk (especially off-lead) every day and isn't over-fed is fine IMO. I just think 'working dog' is ill-defined (most breeds are technically, so colloquially it generally means a dog that you use for work, which makes the advice tautological) and so it's not really helpful advice.

Completely agree. We are chihuahua owners because we have realistic expectations of the time and energy we have to spend on them. I hate that big dogs are so trendy in the US because most owners I see aren’t even close to meeting their dogs’ energy needs. No shit your designer husky who was bred to pull sleds in Alaska is tearing up your suburban couch, this is effectively imprisonment for them.

Don’t get me started on organizations like the AKC that still promote breeding medical issues into dogs to achieve the proper nose shape or whatever so rich people can have tasteful eugenics as a hobby. It’s all very stupid.

I highly implore anyone considering a dog to be honest about what you can support, challenge your assumptions about why you love big dogs, and above all consider adopting over purchasing. I can forgive a lot of the rant above if the alternative was a big dog living in a shelter. That said, we’d have less big dogs in shelters if they weren’t so fetishized by inexperienced owners in the first place.

This is a great and very insightful comment, but I find it funny how all your concerns also apply to the challenges many face with care of humans of all sizes (including themselves and their kids).

A lot of people try to get by on one brief walk in the evening to offset 8 hours of abstract/alien and sedentary desk work, while minimizing core human tasks like handling food or physically building things, and then puzzle over why they're so depressed, reactive, or otherwise neurotic. What you saw in your dogs lives is exactly what many people would do well to see in their own.

Totally! What kicked my ass out of deep depression was 1) I finally worked my way up to moving my body up to a daily exercise I enjoy, 2) found a hobby I could periodically enjoy with others.

> Failure to exercise a large dog properly leads to bad behavior, which is hard to correct because they _really want something to do_. So many people, not providing enough training nor enough job for their dog resort to using harnesses and other restraints when in public, and then when they have company over the dogs are reactive until they are put in the place where they can be out of the way.

This is definitely true...in a single-dog household.

Treat it like dog ADHD. Working/fighting dogs don't want to sit still. Trapping them in an apartment all day, alone, will make them miserable. Would you be happy in solitary confinement?

But-- in my experience (huskies), stimulation appears to be just as effective as the vaunted exercise goals. Crazy as it sounds (and it is a lot of additional work and expense), getting a second husky keeps the first one busy. While she was left alone, she tore everything up and acted out a lot. Now they wrestle with each other all day, terrorize the cats together, and crash on the couch. A constant supply of new toys also helps.

(FWIW they're both rescues; I would never recommend huskies in small spaces, especially not around cats, as a conscious choice-- they're wolves in kabuki mask. Apparently everyone bought huskies because of Game of Thrones and dumped them on the streets once they became difficult. They're wolves. I'm having to build indoor chicken runs for the cats to traverse the house safely.)

Back in the day, Jon Katz (of Slashdot/Slate fame) wrote a book (and several articles) about his experiences with a temperamental Border Collie. Working dogs want to work, so in order to make the dog happy, they had to effectively buy it sheep. It was only after shepherding the sheep was the dog truly happy. Hundreds of years of selective breeding can’t be easily ignored.

I’ve often thought about this with my dogs… when they are being bad, it’s because I didn’t let them run enough or give them enough exercise or attention.

I dont think what you are describing is a large dog. I believe this is more geared towards great danes and the like which are more around 150ish or more pounds. Those dogs require much less exercise and are actually great apartment dogs.

I think a lot of people also, don’t appreciate how expensive a big dog can be. It means larger doses of medication‘s, more pounds of food, everything is just bigger and more expensive per day.

My wife and I had a 7 pound Yorkie from our local SPCA that died pretty recently. As a little dog, especially a Yorkshire terrier, he definitely had his medical bills. But outside of those expenses, our month-to-month costs were almost negligible. A $25 bag of food would last 8-10 weeks. Any medication we got him we broke in half or sometimes even quarters, because they literally didn’t make doses small enough for him, which meant any course of any medication was pretty cheap.

I mostly bring this up because a lot of people assume little dogs are incredibly expensive because of medical issues. They are not wrong per se, and breed matters a lot here, but there are plenty of small and healthy mutts that need good homes and your monthly budget for them is going to be much lower than what you need for some of larger dogs. Plenty of breeds are hypoallergenic, only need short walks, and are overall just not very demanding. Something to consider!

>Plenty of breeds are hypoallergenic

Hypoallergenic dogs are literally a lie, there's no such thing.

https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/1...

It would be more accurate to say there is no such thing as a 100% hypoallergenic dog. But it is well known that different dogs trigger the allergy more intensely than others, so if you get a dog that is considered “hypoallergenic” to use the common vernacular, you are less likely to have many if any symptoms. This largely depends on the individual’s allergies.

I could’ve been more precise with my language I suppose.

Read the article I posted, this is "well known," but it's also, simply, a lie. No such dog breed exists. Your language is not imprecise, you are just spreading outright lies.

>In fact, there may be no such thing as a low-allergy or allergy-free dog, according to a new report. The study found that the quantities of dog allergens in homes with supposedly hypoallergenic breeds are no different from those in homes with dogs widely considered non-hypoallergenic.

>Previous studies have examined dog skin and hair to determine the amount of allergens they contain, and have found wide variations among individual animals, but no consistent differences by breed.

>“I have no idea where this whole concept came from,” said Christine Cole Johnson, the senior author of the study, to be published online in The American Journal of Rhinology and Allergy. “It’s been around for a long time, and maybe people associated it with shedding. I think it’s just a legend.”

Look man, if you want to have a conversation about this I am down, but you need to stop saying that I am lying. I am happy to accept that I could be wrong about this, but that is not the same as lying. Just ease off the gas a little here.

You're repeating a lie made up by breeders to sell dogs. Whether or not you're aware it is a lie doesn't make it not a lie.

Accusing someone of lying is accusing them of deliberately intending to deceive

Chihuahuas are old breeds, they are healthy, cross-bred Chihuahua even more so. Low feed costs, tired easily and if under 20lbs they can ride in cabin on plane trips.

Different dog breeds have different levels of energy. Australian Shepherds are high energy dogs [0], while a Great Pyrenees is a medium energy dog [1]. I'd bet the shepherd in your dog is where the high energy comes from. My ex has a Bernese Mountain Dog, he is pretty mellow and only needs a mile a day or so, he wears out pretty quickly. Best to understand the breed characteristics before you get a dog, go and meet some and see how they behave, get a dog that matches your lifestyle.

[0] https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/australian-shepherd/ (see Personality then Energy Level)

[1] https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/great-pyrenees/

Even within the breed there can be huge variations. We're serial Dachshund owners, and our last Dachshund required daily walks (more like him pulling the walkers by his neck) and even then, he'd have to blow off steam every 4 hours or so just turbo-ing around in circles in the yard. Our current Dachshund basically sleeps all day and will only go for a walk if we force her. Zero energy couch potato.

Dogs have radically different sleep habits to humans, and on average sleep 12 to 14 hours a day in 45 minute bursts. In the wild dogs[0] are crepuscular, meaning they're most active in the twilight hours anyway. Spending the middle of the day at home isn't a huge problem if there are enough hours of activity at the start and end.

I grew up with a lab/kelpie cross, on a 10 acre block with cattle and sheep on it, and he was fine snoozing most of the day because he could run around in the morning and afternoon until exhaustion every day. The other animals kept him active, and we walked him twice a day for a few kilometres total at the same time as other dogs were out for a walk.

[0] "In the wild" meaning feral dogs

I grew up in rural Australia, an unpopular opinion of mine, is that large dogs should never live in apartments, I think it is cruel. (whether they are "couch" potatoes or not)

My unpopular opinion is that people should never live in apartments because they are cruel.

Listen to your dog.

Find yourself a plot of trees and fields. Walk through them every day. Stand out in snow and rain. Listen to the noise the weather makes. Plant something you can eat every year. Pee on a tree. Make friends with a crow.

Life is too short to spend it surrounded by asphalt, cement, and tall buildings.

I genuinely can't tell if you're trolling or not.

I feel that people in dense living situations have cut themselves off from what I call the "emotional wild." Living with a dog's sense of the world is healing in many ways.

The next time you have a strong, but not dangerous, precipitation event, go somewhere you can't hear cars, wear protective gear (rain/cold) and stand out in the weather. As the scandies say, there is no bad weather, only bad clothing.

Listen.

Find your sound. I like the hiss of hard snow falling through pine trees.

Smell.

Take in the smells of the world around you as if you were smelling the nuances of a fine-cooked meal. Let your nose be your eyes and see how a dog sees.

Feel

Notice what the weather feels like when you are surrounded by it.

When you get back home, don't stop noticing sounds and smells. It will give you a better direction than staying in your head.

That literally sounds like my worst nightmare on multiple levels; but I’m glad it works for you.

You should practice what you preach, and throw away everything in your life that was made or designed by someone living in a city.

I had a Bernese Mountain Dog, about 120 lbs (55 kg) of floof. We never lived in a property with a yard or garden, it was always either a townhouse or apartment.

I understand what makes you think that big dogs in an apartment can be cruel, but I think that it's identifying the wrong problem.

Dogs need the right type of exercise and stimulation. Some of this is breed specific, the Aussie/Great Pyr mix up thread would probably have needs closer to my parent's Border Collie who needed (and got) double digit miles per day of movement. A Bernese Mountain Dog has lower energy needs.

As apartment dwellers we made sure that he walked many times a day, often in wilderness areas (an advantage of the PNW), but also often in dog parks, beaches, etc.

I've seen people who have gardens/yards assume that allowing their dog access to the yard is sufficient, rarely if ever walking them.

The key, as with almost all dog or pet issues, is the owner attitude, and has little to do with apartment vs house

I agree that many people get dogs that are not suited for their lifestyle and it is a shame. I don’t think having a harness on a dog in public is a problem though. I have 2 Australian cattle dogs and they are great off leash but not sociable to other dogs. One is friendly or indifferent to strangers but wary of children because she didn’t have exposure to young children growing up or even now. The other is deaf and is nervous about other people.

We go out on long hikes in the timberlands when possible and they aren’t leashed and they’re great about being mindful of where I am and don’t stray too far and come back if I stop. That said they still have their harnesses on, for safety (people hunt there, blaze orange) but also there are unexpected situations that can happen.

Day to day they spend a 1-2 hours of active play in the backyard as well as intermittent play inside. If they aren’t getting enough exercise in they let you know it.

My biggest problem with the oldest one (9) is that the wear and tear on her body from being very active shows and she has a stupid pain tolerance. It is hard to try to engage her in low impact play when she is limping but still happy to sprint across the yard to catch a ball.

For truly big dogs, like a Pyrenees, their later years are really sad because their back tends to just give out on them and they have a ton of trouble just getting up and moving around.

The worst part of dogs is that they don’t live long enough but I’m also not personally interested in artificially extending my dogs lifespan, just making sure they aren’t suffering in their older age.

My wife adopted a border collie a few years before we met. It was bred to be a working dog, but it lived a happy 14 years.

We didn't work it very hard, other than (almost) daily walks and occasional play. Mostly the dog just liked to be held and was very affectionate.

> I'd probably never get a big dog again unless I have a job for them to do.

My sister has a giant Bernese mountain dog, and it was bred to be a giant couch potato.