Do Dogs Need a Routine?

Routine (n): A customary or regular course of procedure.

What do you included in your daily routine? No doubt it is one that is bookended by hygiene activities. Brushing your teeth, bathing or showering - things that help kick-start your day or relax you before bed. Your day might also be scattered with the ritualistic routine of mealtimes, work start/end time, schoolruns, and, of course, dog walks. Does your working week routine get thrown out the window on a weekend? Or do you keep many things the same?

Is a strict routine important for dogs?

Establishing a routine has been documented to provide us humans with many benefits. These benefits may include: better rest; improved eating; reduced stress; and an effective use of time, developing good habits allowing us to live each day to the fullest.

Routines limit the amount of decisions we need to make on a daily basis. If you find out what routine works most effectively for you then you can run through it on a daily basis with little thought - leaving your mind free to focus on more important tasks. 

But what about routines for our dogs? Do they provide our canine companions with the same added benefits as those documented for us?

When I recently asked my Canine Connection Club whether they had a routine or not for their dog, the answers were varied. They ranged from guardians who felt they needed their dogs to be flexible due to their erratic working hours, to those who had a pretty rigid working week but flexible weekends, and then, finally, those who felt their dog thrived on routine and found it very hard to deviate from the normal structure of their day. 

What did seem to be a common answer was that while many daily activities - including walks and mealtimes - could be flexible in their specific time, the one time people seemed to stick to a routine was around bedtime. The final toilet trip, the bedtime treat, and then moving to the area that your dog sleeps in. Routines around sleep are often the biggest discussion point when it comes to raising well-adjusted children - and so it perhaps then follows that our dogs would find a bedtime routine also reassuring. 

Routine at night time can also help, as we are taking a traditionally crepuscular animal (most active at dusk and dawn) and wanting to encourage them to settle during those times. Domesticated dogs are luckily very adaptive and tend to fit in with what us humans deem as socially acceptable sleeping - or waking - hours. Puppies can often be seen to peak in energy in the evenings before they’ve learnt this is the time to settle. Creating a routine for them in those early days is vital in ensuring that they quickly fit into our lifestyle where long periods of sleep overnight is important. 

Puppies can also benefit from fairly strict feeding times. Feeding at regular times can make housetraining and sleeptimes more predictable and consistent. Feeding a natural diet, without lots of colourings and chemicals can, of course, benefit our puppies too - ensuring their energy levels stay pretty consistent rather than erratic. A consistent feeding routine can help dogs keep in shape too - as dogs who are left with food to graze on all day often end up overweight. 

Formulating a routine that works for your dog can offer them a sense of security. We know that when a dog feels relaxed and secure they are able to enjoy all elements of their life in a calmer manner. If your dog doesn’t feel secure - or spends a lot of time following you around trying to work out what your next move is - then they will be spending important energy stressing about that, rather than remaining relaxed. 

Routines for Anxious Dogs

John Bradshaw of the University of Bristol says that if dogs “consistently don't know what's going to happen next, they can get stressed, aggressive or fearful. Dogs whose owners are inconsistent to them often have behavioural disorders."

Dogs who are incredibly anxious or fearful might need to feel they have more control in their lives. Going back to a pretty consistent routine, as you had during puppyhood, might help get them in a more relaxed state as they know what’s expected each day. Once you’ve reached a more relaxed level with your dog, and they’ve built up their feeling of comfort, only then should you consider making very small deviations from the normal routine - by adding in something they enjoy at a different time to usual.

The routine we create for an anxious dog does need to be one that fits in with any behavioural modification work you are looking to achieve. For example, dogs who don’t cope well being left, can be exacerbated by always having a high energy walk straight before going out, especially if they find the world quite scary. If you take them out for a long walk before leaving with the intention of them feeling tired when you leave them, you could in fact be setting them up to feel more aroused. Following a walk, their adrenaline and cortisol levels will be at their highest - so they might already be at a mid-high level of anxiety before you’ve even added the stress of leaving them. While predictable signals can help to allow your dog trust your return will happen, it can be useful to follow a period of exercise outside in the world, with something nice and calming, like chewing or sniffing, before you leave your dog.

Can our dogs adapt? 

If you are someone who has quite a structured routine for your dog then big changes can cause a lot of uncertainty for all involved. If you know that your daily life is going to be affected in a big way - perhaps by the arrival of a new baby, a change in working hours, one carer needing to go into hospital for a prolonged stay, or even a new home - the best thing you can do is to allow your dog to learn certain predictable cues but to keep routines slightly fluid. These huge life changes are out of our dog’s control and we cannot verbalise that all is going to be ok - that things will return to a normal pace of life soon. By keeping some key cornerstones of our dog’s days - or just remaining predictable - we can help our dogs cope.

And perhaps that is what we should be looking to achieve for our dogs - predictability instead of a rigid routine? Predictability from the human end of the lead allows our dogs to manage expectations. It can help them to feel more relaxed when changes occur or we need them to cope with a temporary change in living environments.

Is predictability more important than routine?

Can we perhaps create multiple routines that stem from individual predictable actions? Routines that allow for changes from the working week to the weekend? Or that allow you to be working from home some days and have a dog walker on others? Perhaps you have young children, so life needs to be a little more flexible as they grow and their needs change? A dog that can cope with change is one who is going to feel more relaxed generally. 

While, as we’ve already discussed, puppies really can benefit from a strict routine - should we try to set our adult dogs up to be more bomb-proof when it comes to the things they can cope with? 

As our puppies grow, or rescue dogs settle and relax, we can slowly start to make some slight fluctuations in their routine. Starting perhaps by shifting mealtimes ever-so-slightly around or changing the way we feed our dogs - ditching the traditional bowl for food toys or slow feeders that mean they need to spend a little more time consuming their food. We can maintain predictability in that our dogs will always get their two meals a day, they just come a little off-schedule. 

We definitely don’t want to change everything for our dogs in one go, if we can help it. Changing two areas of our dog’s life in one go can be quite a lot for them to cope with. But if we gradually make changes to times of walks, OR how much engagement they get from one day to the next, OR perhaps the number of visitors to the house, then we slowly are changing our dogs expectations and improving their resilience. 

We must remain predictable in the way we treat our dogs during any changes. Stay consistent with boundaries and the positive manner we interact with our dogs. Being predictable in the way you reward your dog is also really important in establishing a level of trust with your dog - as well as them fully understanding what is expected of them. 

Being able to be flexible in our routine - or just having more of a fluid schedule - can make life a lot easier for all. Our dogs learn to trust their food or walks will come at some point, but they’re not chomping at the bit as soon as the clock strikes a specific hour. The dog that learns precisely what time their dinner will arrive can find the build up to that time quite arousing - meaning they aren’t calm as they approach the bowl. Eating in a frantic manner won’t aid digestion and can lead to bloat. 

Overall, if we can be consistent enough to build trust with our dogs, yet flexible that they can cope on days when things might not go to plan, then you will most likely have a dog that feels relaxed on a daily basis. 

In the end though, our dogs are individuals. Some dogs will be able to cope with a more flexible routine and still sleep comfortably, eat reliably, and generally feel relaxed. Whereas some dogs strive on knowing what the next event of the day is - and so this is where our small predictable cues can give them comfort.