Being Awake All Day Is a Lot to Ask

At home, a dog's day follows a schedule that most of us quietly envy. A comfortable start, a gentle stretch, a brief relocation to a slightly warmer patch of sofa and then, broadly speaking, an afternoon of committed horizontal effort. This is not laziness. This is a well-organised life.

Holidays change all of that. Suddenly there is breakfast to attend, a morning walk, a café, another walk, somebody discovering a local attraction that absolutely cannot be missed, a pub lunch, the journey back and the sustained expectation that the dog will remain conscious and engaged throughout all of it. It is, if you think about it from the dog's perspective, an enormous amount to ask.

This piece follows on from the first feral day, which covers the initial chaos of arriving somewhere new. This one is about what comes next: the slow realisation that being awake and enthusiastic for an entire holiday is genuinely hard work, and what we learned from giving Jazz a better way to manage it.

Being Awake Was Not Jazz's Normal Schedule

Jazz was, by nature, a dog built for warmth, closeness and comfort. She was happiest pressed against someone she loved, preferably on something soft, ideally with a blanket nearby. She had strong opinions about where the best spots in the house were and moved between them with the quiet authority of someone who has given the matter serious thought.

A holiday, by contrast, involves being switched on from the moment the day starts. There are new smells before breakfast, new people by mid-morning and an unbroken sequence of novel experiences that require a dog to remain alert, interested and socially present for hours at a stretch. For a younger, bouncy dog with reserves to burn, this might be fine. For a dog whose domestic rhythm involves a great deal of thoughtful rest, it is a very different proposition.

The question was not whether Jazz could still enjoy a holiday. She absolutely could. The question was how to make sure she spent her energy on the parts that were actually worth it.

A Full Day of Being Included

There is a particular kind of dog who cannot afford to miss anything. They do not choose this. It is simply the way they are made. Jazz was completely devoted and wanted to be present for all of it — every departure, every arrival, every rustling wrapper that might, in fairness, contain something directly relevant to her.

The coat was a particular source of concern. Any hand moving toward outerwear had to be monitored. A bag shifting from one side of the room to the other required at least a preliminary investigation. Someone standing up could mean anything — it could mean nothing, but it could also mean cheese — and Jazz was not prepared to be caught napping when the answer turned out to be the latter. She had a habit of treating even the briefest separation from me as a significant event and greeting my reappearance with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for people returning from sea, so the vigilance was, in her view, entirely justified.

The effort of a holiday day is easy to underestimate because so much of it is invisible. New sounds, new smells, unfamiliar people and an entirely different backdrop all require a dog to process information that, at home, would simply not be there. By early afternoon, a dog who looks fine may have already done considerably more cognitive work than their usual Tuesday. Jazz was always game, but game is not the same as inexhaustible. Pepsi and Boodle, who were also on this holiday and possessed the kind of energy that makes you tired just watching, did not share this problem. They were fine. They are always fine. Jazz had different priorities and a considerably more dignified approach to conservation.

The Queen in Her Carriage

On Jazz's last holiday, we hired a dog buggy. It was, with the benefit of hindsight, one of the better decisions we made.

The arrangement suited Jazz in a way that felt almost suspiciously convenient for her. She would settle into the buggy and sleep while we pushed her around, conserving herself entirely for the moments that mattered. When we reached somewhere genuinely interesting — somewhere with proper sniff potential, somewhere with texture and variety and the lingering suggestion of other animals — she would wake up, climb out and investigate with real purpose. Then we wheeled her back to the car. She arrived fresh, she gave the place a thorough going-over and she was not running on empty by the time we got back.

Pepsi and Boodle were not offered the buggy. They did not want it. They were too busy bouncing.

We called her The Queen, which was not really a joke. Jazz accepted the attention the buggy attracted from passing strangers with absolute composure. People stopped to look, to comment, to make a fuss of her, and she received all of it exactly as she felt it was owed: warmly, graciously and without any apparent surprise. She had always expected this level of service, really. It had just taken us a while to provide it.

Dog buggies are not cheap to buy, but in our experience you can usually find one to hire through Facebook — a search in local selling or pet groups before the holiday is worth the ten minutes it takes. It made a genuine difference to how Jazz experienced the trip and, by extension, to how the rest of us experienced it too.

The Sniff Was Too Good to Ignore

It would be misleading to describe the buggy as a complete handover of editorial control. Jazz remained the final decision-maker on all matters of sniff significance, and on one occasion the sniff potential in the immediate vicinity was clearly too pressing to wait for an official stop.

She jumped out. This was near a road. We retrieved the situation and Jazz resumed her position with the calm of someone who had made a reasonable executive decision and saw no need to discuss it further.

A buggy does not override a dog's own judgement about what constitutes an emergency. It just means they are rested enough to act on it with conviction.

Spend the Energy Where It Matters

The buggy did not turn Jazz into a different dog. It just meant that the energy she had went on the sniffing rather than the walk to get there, which is a much better use of everyone's afternoon.

Most dogs on holiday do not need a buggy. What they usually need is a slightly shorter programme, a longer lunch stop and permission to skip the afternoon excursion that is, if we are honest, mostly for us anyway. We tend to schedule holidays for dogs as though they are highly motivated cruise-ship guests, when most of them would quite like to miss the 2pm activity and have a lie-down.

Jazz's version happened to involve a hired carriage, a series of premium sniff locations and an adoring public who stopped to admire her along the way. She was chauffeured between points of interest, investigated each one thoroughly and was home before the magic wore off. Honestly, she had the right idea.

If your dog is starting to flag by mid-morning, it is probably not because they are getting old or difficult. It is because being awake, alert and socially responsible for an entire holiday is a lot to ask of a creature whose usual Tuesday peaks at around ten minutes of genuine effort.

Build in the nap. Shorten the programme. Identify the one thing your dog actually wants from the day — in Jazz's case, a good sniff, delivered fresh — and work backwards from there. The holiday will be better for it, and you will not need to hire a buggy. Although if you do, the Facebook groups are surprisingly well stocked.