{"id":2290,"date":"2012-01-27T03:00:11","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leanmeanvirilemachine.com\/?p=2290"},"modified":"2012-01-26T22:34:01","modified_gmt":"2012-01-27T06:34:01","slug":"walking-the-dog-a-26000-year-old-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/27\/walking-the-dog-a-26000-year-old-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking the Dog–A 26,000 Year Old Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been a dog lover my whole life.<\/p>\n

I was born and raised in a house with three golden retrievers, so I suppose I had no choice in the matter. I was destined to be a dog person.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet with great dog comes great responsibility, and unless you get a breed with a naturally low activity rate, you\u2019re going to have to walk that little bugger.<\/p>\n

Not only is this a great opportunity for daily low-intensity exercise, it also has far-reaching benefits, which I have found for myself firsthand.<\/p>\n

Dogs and Humans, a Brief History<\/h2>\n

The history of humans and dogs is foggy for obvious reasons, but one thing\u2019s for sure: it goes back a looooooooong way.<\/p>\n

The commonly accepted view is that dogs first became domesticated around 15,000 years ago, predating even agriculture, but this idea has been challenged in recent years.<\/p>\n

France\u2019s Chauvet Cave<\/a> is best known for its cave paintings, but it also contains some curious footprints. A young child holding a torch walked side by side with a canine companion about 26,000 years ago, both leaving behind tracks that have lasted to this day.<\/p>\n

It was the first known existence of walking the dog.<\/a><\/p>\n

And just recently, a skull was found in a Siberian cave that appears to be a 33,000 year old domesticated dog skull<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s commonly believed that dogs descended from weak wolves, who would stay close to human camps and eat their scraps and waste.<\/p>\n

This paradigm is slowly shifting to one of co-evolution: that dogs helped us evolve just as much as we helped them to.<\/p>\n

It now seems more likely that humans first teamed up with wolves while both were hunting the same animals. The mutually beneficial combination of such things as dogs\u2019s speed and sense of smell with humans\u2019s endurance and tool-making made everyone involved successful.<\/p>\n

The success of this symbiotic relationship meant that humans and some wolves\u2013the ancestors of today\u2019s dogs\u2013began living together.<\/p>\n

The One Chore I Enjoy<\/h2>\n

I hate chores and errands. Hate them hate them hate them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not because I\u2019m an irresponsible man-child, but because I know they\u2019ll never be finished.<\/p>\n

I have gone through periods of domesticity before, and have literally spent every non-sleeping, non-working moment of my life cleaning, organizing, doing maintenance, and the like.<\/p>\n

But even then, I couldn\u2019t get everything done. And my place still<\/em> looked like shit.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I think that what I put into chores far exceeds what I get out of them, by a proportion of 1,000 to 1. It just doesn\u2019t seem worth it to me.<\/p>\n

And yet you HAVE to do at least a little bit of the damned things, which leaves me one cranky dude.<\/p>\n

(Honestly, it isn\u2019t things like flashy cars and big houses that motivate me to try to get ahead in life, it\u2019s earning enough money that I can outsource literally every chore and errand. That\u2019s how I\u2019ll know I\u2019ve made it!)<\/p>\n

And yet there\u2019s one chore that I actually look forward to<\/em> each and every day\u2013even though it takes up somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes\u2013taking my dog Oscar for a walk.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/em><\/p>\n

As a longtime dog lover, I really enjoy getting to hang out with my buddy each day with no distractions. In addition, I\u2019ve found that I can get my best thinking done during this time. Again, no distractions<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Man\u2019s Best Friend<\/h2>\n

Everyone has their \u201crituals,\u201d otherwise tedious tasks repeated every day that serve as an anchor to re-energize and reinvigorate them.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s shaving. Perhaps it\u2019s brushing your teeth. But I can say in all honesty that if you have a dog, you might be surprised at how much more productive you can be, how much more fun you can have, and how much easier it is to make physical activity a part of your life when you volunteer to walk the dog.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tradition that is literally thousands of years old, coded into your DNA.<\/p>\n

\n

So one of my big goals this year was to publish an article each and every Friday. Less than a month in I\u2019m sorry to say that I already won\u2019t be able to fulfill this.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m heading out of the country for a couple of weeks, where I won\u2019t be touching a computer, and try as I did to write four posts in a week (including a guest post I\u2019m working on) it just ain\u2019t gonna happen.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll make it up for y\u2019all by publishing a couple of \u201cbonus posts\u201d when I get back into town.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just way too much to be taken care of right now\u2026 and I\u2019m so damned tired. Talk to you guys again in three weeks!<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been a dog lover my whole life. I was born and raised in a house with three golden retrievers, so I suppose I had no choice in the matter. I was destined to be a dog person. Yet with great dog comes great responsibility, and unless you get a breed with a naturally low […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exercise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2290"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2295,"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2290\/revisions\/2295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theguycancook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}