My weirdo dog likes neighborhood walks now?

Reflections on preferences and fulfillment opportunities changing over time

For the last two weeks, we’ve been visiting friends and family on a route from central Florida to central Wisconsin.

Scout does not particularly love the chaos that can come from being inside someone else’s home (with other animals, squawking children, perhaps a rowdy game of charades or Mario Kart) so she spends much of these visits in our temperature-controlled van. The less time we are physically with her, the more critically we have to think about her fulfillment. Are we giving her what she deserves? Is it fair to ask her to relax on her own?

Is she happy?

In my early days as a dog owner, I idolized “classic” neighborhood walks. Part of this was Scout’s fear-based dog reactivity—the ability to go on a casual stroll where we might encounter other dogs felt impossible and so also impossibly tantalizing—but part of it was internalizing popular messages over the years. If you have a dog? You walk the dog. It’s just what you do.

The thing is that Scout did not enjoy neighborhood walks. She’d spend more time scanning her surroundings with anxiety than investigating with curiosity. If I constantly fed her treats, sure, she had an okay time. If we’d taken the same route repeatedly, sure, she’d find some comfort in knowing what to expect. But I spent too long begging her to become a happy-go-lucky suburban dog before finally abandoning that arbitrary dream in favor of asking what actually brought her joy.

And what fulfilled our cattle dog most was play. She loves to compete with us during tug and cooperate with us during fetch. She loves to parade around a prize—a textured stick, an old frisbee someone left behind at the park—she won fair and square. Play has been the gateway to basically everything good in our life.

When we talked about moving into a van full time, I was worried about our ability to fulfill Scout with the raucous games we’d all come to love. Her confidence to engage in play often depended on her familiarity with an environment—new places made her nervous, and nervousness did not beget goofing off—and I didn’t know how she’d adjust to our constant travel. Thankfully with each new place we parked (and each new challenge we faced together, as a team) her resilience only grew.

And then, maybe a little over a year ago, we noticed something weird: Our sensitive cattle dog was… enjoying neighborhood walks?

She was leading the way. She was stopping to sniff. She was continuing to sniff even when monster garbage trucks blared deafening engines five feet from where she stood. She was lingering on the edge of yards that contained barking dogs because the scent trails intrigued her more than the fellow canids intimidated her. She was hopping back into the van with relaxed body language instead of a frantic desire to escape the outside world’s stress.

“Who is this dog?” we asked ourselves. “How did this happen?”

It was not like we’d been working with any intention towards this goal. We’d let it go so long ago. Of course, once we stopped prioritizing it for the wrong reasons we arrived there on her own timeline.

Today simple walks are a completely reasonable way to fulfill Scout. I used to teeter between putting neighborhood strolls in the “biological fulfillment” and “focus work” categories of our daily fulfillment checklist because so often they drained her. Now? Barring terrible flukes (like being hounded by an off-leash dog or startled by a kid on a Razor scooter) they are almost guaranteed to fill her cup.

Yesterday we went on three walks—all in urban areas of Madison, Wisconsin and all on leash—and Scout fell into bed with satisfied exhaustion. I know some of this is her age, of course. I’d be remiss not to admit she just needs less from us than ever before.

But she’s also just more at peace in the world than ever before.

Year over year, Scout the weirdo rescued blue heeler becomes more like a normal dog who can do normal things without oodles of management. While I still think “normal” is overrated (farewell, arbitrary expectations on diverse living creatures!) it’s pretty damn satisfying to feel like we have all these extra opportunities.

Sometimes it feels like our huge transformations are done after all this time and all our work. Turns out we’re still growing.