Every walk we do follows the same route. Left out of the front door, down towards the postbox, right at the corner shop, home in twenty five minutes. I decided this route without really thinking about it years ago, and my dog has simply gone along with it ever since, presumably wondering the entire time why we never turn left at the corner shop instead. So I tried an experiment. For one week, wherever he pulled, we went.
Day one was chaos, if I'm honest. He led us straight past our usual turn and down an alley I didn't even know existed, one street over from a road I've driven down a hundred times. It ended at a little row of garages and a cat who was deeply unimpressed with both of us. Not glamorous, but it was new, and that alone felt strange after years of the same twenty five minutes on repeat.
By day three, a pattern started to emerge. He wasn't just pulling randomly, he had actual preferences. He avoided the road with the loud bin lorry that comes on Wednesdays, he always wanted to detour past the park bench where an elderly man feeds the pigeons most mornings, and he had zero interest in the direction of the vet, unsurprisingly. Turns out my dog has opinions about our neighbourhood that I'd never bothered to notice.
The best walk of the week happened on day five, purely by accident. He pulled us down a footpath I'd always assumed was a dead end, and it opened onto a stretch of field I didn't know was there, tucked behind the houses two streets from mine. We'd lived here three years. He found it in about four minutes.
By the end of the week I'd started noticing things about my own street that I'd stopped seeing. The house with the incredible roses. The gap in the fence where a fox clearly gets through most nights, judging by the state of next door's bins. None of this was information I was looking for. It just showed up because I stopped steering.
I'm not saying I've abandoned my usual route entirely, some mornings you just need the twenty five minute version and nothing more. But I've kept the habit of letting him choose at least once a week, and it's become considerably one of the better parts of my week, not because the walks are longer or more impressive, just because they're actually his for a change, rather than mine with him attached.
I've told a few other dog owners about the experiment since, and the reaction is usually the same, a slightly sheepish laugh followed by an admission that they too have a fixed route they've never really questioned. It seems to be a fairly universal habit, this business of picking a walk once and never revisiting it.
It's made me think differently about the idea of a routine generally, not just walks. How many other small decisions have I made once, years ago, and simply never revisited since, purely out of habit rather than any genuine preference for doing things that particular way.
Turns out my dog had been quietly mapping this neighbourhood far better than I ever bothered to, and all it took to find that out was letting go of the lead's direction, if not the lead itself.
