Dogs With Jas

Finley is 7 🥲 shoutout to the best dog ever. Here’s to another year of eating food off my fork, rolling around in grass, and being too old for Leo DiCaprio

ANSWER: After daycare, your dog should be tired, but still active.

Your dog should NOT be exhausted nor full of zoomies. Either of those options indicates that daycare is too overstimulating for your dog, and they are “crashing” afterwards. This is not a healthy place for a dog to regularly be.

Many dog owners like daycare because it is soooo tiring for their dog. And while it should be fulfilling both mentally and physically, keywords like “exhausted” are red flags for me.

A healthy dog should not need a multi-day “recovery period” after daycare. They should not flop on the couch and be dead to the world for 4+ hours after. They should not be unwilling to go on a walk, engage with people, etc.

One of the reasons I’m not a huge proponent of daycares is because I find it to be “too much” more often than not. Beyond the other issues and dangers that come with utilizing daycares, even at its best, dogs do not thrive off of 6-8+ hours per day of constant stimulation.

This is why preschools for children have nap time, planned quiet activities, and are often half-days. Developmentally, dogs are anecdotally comparable to preschoolers. The benefit of preschool comes from the structure. Likewise, the benefit of daycare does too.

A “perfect” doggy daycare would have social time intermingled with individual sleep time, food and/or toy based enrichment time, engagement with humans, and decompression activities.

Of course, this is difficult to do large scale, which is why most daycares don’t.

In the absence of a daycare that is able to provide a balanced day for your dog, I highly recommend that people have a dog walker come and do drop in-visits midday. Your dog will benefit far more from concentrated one-on-one time alongside calm, adequate rest.

Questions? Let me know in the comments 👇