Why You Can’t Out-Exercise a High Drive Dog

I work with a lot of high drive, high energy dogs. GSPs, Malinois, shepherds, working dogs, sport dogs. One of the most common things I hear from owners is some version of, “I cannot possibly exercise this dog enough.” And usually, that’s because trying to physically exhaust them is the wrong goal.

Part of the reason comes down to genetics and the predatory motor sequence. Predatory behavior in dogs can be broken into a series of components, broadly including searching or orienting, stalking, chasing, grabbing, killing and consuming. Through generations of selective breeding, humans have altered the expression of those components, strengthening, modifying or inhibiting particular behaviors to create dogs suited to very different jobs.

Pointing dogs are a great example. We selected dogs with a strong desire to search for game, locate it and stop at the point rather than immediately continuing into pursuit. Herding breeds show exaggerated portions of the sequence involving orientation, eye, stalk and chase while other components have been inhibited. Retrievers were selected to find, pick up and carry game without destroying it. These aren’t simply breed stereotypes. Research has demonstrated heritable components to behaviors including pointing, herding, tracking and hunting.

That matters because physical exercise and behavioral fulfillment aren’t necessarily the same thing. A GSP can run several miles and still have had very little opportunity to search, hunt, make decisions or use his nose. A Malinois can chase a ball until he’s physically tired without learning how to settle when the game is over. If our answer every time a dog struggles to settle is more exercise, we’re addressing the problem by making the dog tired rather than teaching him how to handle not being tired.

And dogs get fitter. I tell clients all the time that if you try to exercise a high drive dog into exhaustion, you’re probably just creating a very fit monster. Keep adding physical activity every time the dog wants more, and his capacity for it increases right along with it. Now you have a dog who can go even longer and still hasn’t developed the skill set to settle when nothing is happening. The goal should never be to physically exhaust a dog into finally being able to live with him.

At the same time, appropriate outlets absolutely matter. If generations of selection have produced dogs who are strongly motivated to search, hunt, track, retrieve, chase, control movement or work cooperatively with a handler, it makes sense to consider those behavioral needs when we’re deciding what constitutes meaningful enrichment. Breed gives us useful information, but the individual dog still matters. The goal isn’t to perfectly recreate an ancestral job every day. It’s to understand what the dog in front of us finds intrinsically rewarding and give him appropriate opportunities to do it.

This is one of the reasons I love nose work so much. There’s research showing that dogs who participated in nose work responded more positively to uncertain situations afterward than dogs who spent the same period doing heelwork. The researchers suggested that opportunities to use olfaction, engage in natural foraging behavior and make independent choices may have contributed to the difference. It’s a good example of why what a dog is doing can matter just as much as how much energy he burns doing it.

But fulfillment is only half of this conversation. An off switch matters too.

I hear all the time that my GSPs are unicorns because of how well they can turn it on and turn it back off. I can ask them to work incredibly hard for a long period of time, and when I need that intensity and drive, it’s there. But they don’t need that every day in order to be okay. They can have a day off. They can have several days off. They can hang out in my office while I work and just exist without destroying my house or climbing the walls because nobody entertained them that day.

Some of that is genetics. I deliberately select for a natural off switch in my own dogs because it’s important to me. But much of it is learned. My dogs are given opportunities to do things that fulfill them, and they’re also taught that sometimes nothing is happening. They don’t need to be entertained every waking minute, and they don’t need to be physically exhausted before they’re capable of settling.

At the end of the day, I think this is a welfare issue for both dogs and the people who live with them. We owe it to dogs to teach them how to exist comfortably in their own skin. They should be able to take a breath, settle and be okay when nothing is happening. Their only options shouldn’t be constantly working or being confined because they don’t know how to handle doing nothing. And people shouldn’t have to structure their entire lives around physically exhausting a dog just to make him tolerable to live with.

High drive dogs can be taught to settle without taking away the drive that makes them who they are. It takes time, and for some dogs it takes a lot more intentional training than others, but those skills matter. A dog who can work hard when it’s time to work and genuinely settle when it isn’t gets to be part of so much more of our lives. There is a lot of living that happens in between, and I think we owe it to our dogs to teach them how to be comfortable there.

Sources for anyone who wants to dig deeper:

Spady, T.C. & Ostrander, E.A. (2008). “Canine Behavioral Genetics: Pointing Out the Phenotypes and Herding up the Genes.” The American Journal of Human Genetics.

McLennan, T. (2023). “Review of literature on interventions aimed at resolving problems caused by predatory behaviour in dogs (Canis familiaris).” Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Duranton, C. & Horowitz, A. (2019). “Let me sniff! Nosework induces positive judgment bias in pet dogs.” Applied Animal Behaviour Science.