Dogged diligence in order

It’s the old story. If your dog is fat, you need more exercise. Walking the dog doesn’t do the owner any harm, to be sure, but far too many are missing in action. Or missing through inaction, anyway. SPCA research suggests that less than 30 per cent of Kiwi dog owners walk their pets daily, as you’re meant to.

That’s a significant fail rate. And fail is what it is. This isn’t just a matter of falling short on some idealised perfect-case scenario.

If you’re too busy to exercise your dog properly you’re too busy to be a dog owner.

It’s a real commitment and clearly too many of us have a hazily inadequate, even fictional, idea of what’s required.

The price is paid and not only by the neglected dog, shaming though this is in itself.

The howling, baying, yapping and other vocalised distress of insufficiently exercised and socialised dogs is a notorious neighbourhood torment.

Naggingly unpleasant in itself, and a sign that things just aren’t as they should be.

It’s easy to talk glowingly about how a good walk is de-stressing for owner and animal but let’s not deny that things can go wrong.

For starters other people out there might find your pooch intimidating.

Some of those people will be young children and, yes, there’s a strong argument for parents to educate them.

But all too often it’s been an unhappy experience that has created the tension and the approach of even the most well-behaved dog in the world is still capable of scaring someone who has a vivid memory of how things have played out before.

In which case the serenity of the owner who thinks the distress is simply nothing that need concern them, it not being their fault, is at best meanly impolite.

When it comes to dog-meets-dog encounters, keeping dogs on leads is important. There are places where dogs can reasonably run free and fair enough.

Their lives surely shouldn’t be strangers to ball, stick or Frisbee.

It just falls to the owner to be confident, and in an educated rather than carelessly optimistic way, of how well socialised their dog is.

A particularly unhappy scenario is when a dog on a lead encounters an unrestrained dog.

The owner of the unleashed dog may say it’s just being friendly and wants to play, but for the dog on the lead – quite apart from potentially harbouring a boosted sense of superiority that comes from feeling connected to their person – it’s a threatening invasion of personal space and their usual flight-or-fight options have just been halved. So grrrr.

Other practical issues can arise, not the least of which relates to the end of the dog where the teeth aren’t.

Dog walkers who don’t carry and use poo bags (which also means disposing of them appropriately rather than surreptitiously) are being squalid as well as irresponsible.

But look, there’s something truly joyous about a well-trained dog and all the benign enthusiasms that they bring not only to their own homes, but also to our collective outdoor life.

It just falls to the owner to be confident, and in an educated rather than carelessly optimistic way, of how well socialised their dog is.