How much exercise a dog needs: what has actually been measured, what was invented, and how an Indian day constrains it

How much exercise a dog needs, and why nobody can give you a number

How much exercise a dog needs has no measured answer, because no study has assigned pet dogs to different daily doses and followed what happened to them. Everything published is an estimate, and the spread between the estimates is the real finding.

Start with the bodies that have no product to sell. PDSA, a British veterinary charity, says most dogs need at least 1-2 walks per day, and that some breeds need a minimum of one to two hours of exercise per day. The American Kennel Club publishes a page titled How Much Exercise Does a Dog Need Every Day. Read end to end, it gives no duration of any kind. What it says is that a dog's breed heavily influences the level of physical activity they need, and that high-energy breeds require a lot more exercise than lower-energy breeds. A page with that title and no number in it is telling you something.

The commercial pages that rank in India fill the silence. Read off the Indian results page on 21 October 2026, the offers are between thirty minutes and two hours of vigorous exercise daily from a South African retailer, at least ninety minutes from a DNA testing company, a solid hour of moderate-intensity exercise from a pet food brand's Canadian site, and one hour flat from a US pet portal. Those are the pages' own words as the results page renders them, we did not open all eight, and none of them is a source for anything here. The point is the spread: a factor of four, for the same question, on the same screen. Two of the top eight for the India-scoped version of the query are a Pinterest pin and a blog belonging to an American human fitness centre.

The gap is not laziness on the vets' part. It is the state of the evidence. The largest systematic review of risk factors for canine osteoarthritis and its predisposing joint diseases found that 77 percent of the existing literature, 48 of 62 papers, is retrospective in design, and that such studies are fundamentally unable to show causality. Only 23 percent of the papers were prospective longitudinal cohorts, which the authors name as the design that would be needed. Nobody has run the experiment a minutes-per-day figure would require.

What has been measured is what owners actually do. The Generation Pup cohort in the United Kingdom and Ireland asked owners to report walk frequency and duration at three ages, with 2,225 dogs answering at 16 weeks, 1,200 at 9 months and 808 at 15 months. At all three ages dogs were most commonly walked twice a day. In the subgroup of 609 dogs with data at every point, the median total weekday walk duration was 45 minutes at 16 weeks, 1 hour 15 minutes at 9 months and 1 hour 30 minutes at 15 months. Read that correctly: it is a description of British practice, not a prescription, and no equivalent measurement exists for India.

The only exercise number written into Indian law, and who it binds

India has a daily exercise figure in law, and no page ranking for this question quotes it: at least thirty minutes twice per day, in rule 24(6) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Dog Breeding and Marketing) Rules, 2017. Read the clause carefully, because it is weaker than it first looks.

The Rules set out what a breeder's care plan has to contain. Among the listed items are adequate exercise either in a fenced area or on a leash with a person on the other end, exercising for at least thirty minutes twice per day, and socialising with people at suitable intervals equaling at least three hours per day for adult and five hours per day for pups less than four months of age. Separately, the Rules require that dogs over twelve weeks of age housed by any animal shelter, boarding kennel, commercial kennel, commercial breeder, trader, other dealer, exhibitor, or other licensee shall be provided the opportunity for exercise regularly, and that the frequency, method and duration of the opportunity for exercise shall be determined by the consultant veterinary practitioner.

Four things in that are worth an Indian owner's attention.

1. It is an example, not a floor. Rule 24(6) says the opportunity for exercise may be provided in a number of ways, including that one, and it closes the list with other similar activities. The binding words are in rule 24(4)(b), where the frequency, method and duration are the consultant veterinary practitioner's to set. So thirty minutes twice a day is what the drafters thought a reasonable kennel day looks like, which is worth knowing, rather than a number anyone is obliged to hit.
2. It binds kennels and shelters, not your flat. If you board your dog in India, this is the standard the boarding kennel is held to, and it is a fair question to ask at the gate.
3. It names a fenced area or a leash with a person on the other end. The Rules are explicit that a yard the dog is turned out into alone is not the same thing as exercise with a handler.
4. It puts duration in a vet's hands. On the Rules' own wording, the frequency, method and duration are the consultant veterinary practitioner's decision, not a number anybody can publish for all dogs.

There is a second Indian instrument, and it is the one that reaches a pet owner. Section 11(1)(g) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 makes it an offence to neglect to exercise reasonably any dog habitually chained up or kept in close confinement. That clause, its penalty and the textual disagreement between two official copies of it are set out on leaving your dog alone at home, which owns that question. For this page the point is narrow: Indian law states a duty to exercise a confined dog and declines to attach a number to it, while the kennel rules attach a number and apply it to institutions rather than homes.

Duration, intensity and type are three different doses

To size a dog's exercise properly, treat duration, intensity and type as three separate dials, because thirty minutes of sniffing along a wall and thirty minutes of running beside a cycle are not the same dose in any sense that matters.

Almost every chart on the internet collapses all three into one minutes figure. That is why a chart can tell a Pug owner and a Beagle owner the same thing and be wrong for both. Duration is how long. Intensity is how hard, which decides heat load, joint load and recovery time. Type is what the dog is actually doing, which decides whether the session leaves the dog tired, wound up or neither.

The only published intensity standards are pass marks, not prescriptions

Two formal tests exist and both are pass-or-fail screens rather than exercise prescriptions. The Finnish Kennel Club's breeding test requires a dog to briskly walk or trot on the leash for 1,000 metres within a breed-specific time limit, 11 minutes for Pugs, French Bulldogs and Boston Terriers and 12 minutes for other breeds, and to recover to pre-walk status in heart rate, body temperature and general condition within 15 minutes. A kilometre in eleven minutes is roughly 5.5 kilometres an hour, which is a purposeful human walking pace and not a stroll. The second test, the three-minute brisk trot used in respiratory function grading, is set out on brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome in dogs, which owns it.

Borrow the principle rather than the protocol. If you want to know whether a session was too hard for your dog, time how long it takes to stop panting and settle afterwards, in a cool room. Fifteen minutes is the number the breeding test uses, and a dog that is still working to breathe well past that did more than it was fit for.

Off lead is a dose variable, and somebody has measured it

How much of a walk the dog spends on the lead changes what the walk is, and the Generation Pup cohort tracked it. On weekdays, most 16-week-old puppies spent 75 to 100 percent of total walk time on lead, most 9-month-old dogs spent 25 to under 50 percent, and most 15-month-old dogs spent under 25 percent. The total duration went up with age and the proportion under restraint went down. In an Indian city the second half of that trajectory is usually unavailable, because there is nowhere safe to let a dog off a lead, so the duration rises while the freedom does not. That is a real difference between a British hour and an Indian hour, and no exercise chart accounts for it.

Type is the dial most owners never touch. A slow walk where the dog can sniff and explore is great for their mental health, in PDSA's words, and it is a different activity from a brisk walk used to burn energy. What scent work has and has not been shown to do, and why the popular claim that ten minutes of sniffing replaces an hour of walking has no source, are set out in full on dog boredom and enrichment in India. This page does not rebuild that argument. It only insists that you count a sniffing walk as its own thing rather than as a short version of a fast one.

The five minutes per month puppy rule, and where it came from

The five minutes per month of age rule has no identifiable author and no study behind it, and the veterinary pages that discuss it say so in their own words rather than defending it.

The rule, as it is usually stated, allows a puppy five minutes of lead walking per month of age, up to twice a day, until it is fully grown. Purina India states it on its Indian site with the arithmetic worked out, that puppies should have no more than five minutes of on lead walking exercise for each month of age, two times a day, so a five-month-old puppy would have no more than 25 minutes lead walking twice a day. That page cites nothing and names no veterinarian. Four of the eight results on the Indian first page for the puppy query repeat the same formula as advice, and a fifth, a clinical review written for vets, sets out the debate about whether research supports it.

Four veterinary-authored sources were read in full for this page, and here is what each one says.

• PDSA, one of the two bodies the rule is most often attributed to, states on its own puppy exercise page that there is no scientific evidence behind this rule, and that it is not appropriate for most puppies.
• Rebecca MacMillan BVetMed MRCVS, writing a review of the evidence, says the rule is not based on any scientific evidence and that many vets no longer recommend it.
• Robyn Lowe RVN, writing for Veterinary Voices UK, does not defend a number at all. Her position is that exercise for puppies needs to be tailored to your dog as an individual, and that each dog should be assessed individually based on their breed, temperament and physical status.
• Improve Veterinary Education, in a clinical-library review written for vets, records that the advice exists to protect puppies from premature and debilitating musculoskeletal issues, such as osteoarthritis, that while this guideline is supported and promoted by some professional organisations in the UK, debate remains around whether the guideline is adequately supported by research.

Not one of the four names an originator. We looked for one specifically, including a direct check of the breed body the rule is most commonly credited to, whose puppy exercise URL returned HTTP 404 on this attempt, 21 October 2026. The honest conclusion is that the rule is an orphan. It is repeated with total confidence by brands, insurers and clinics, and the trail runs out before it reaches a person, a paper or a date.

Why it survives anyway, and the version that is worth keeping

An orphan rule can still be useful, and dismissing it outright is as unhelpful as repeating it. Its real function is as a brake on the one thing that genuinely does hurt growing dogs: long, repetitive, human-paced road walking and obsessive ball chasing. Lowe's advice is exactly that, to avoid high impact, repetitive, prolonged jarring exercise, and not to let your dog obsessively chase balls and toys.

The Improve review proposes a revision worth reading. Rather than five minutes per month of age full stop, it suggests five minutes per month of age of walking distance plus a further five minutes per month of age for exploring, observing, training and interacting with others under supervision, twice a day. In other words, cap the structured walking and stop counting the free, self-paced, sniffing part against the same budget. That is a proposal from one review rather than a standard, and this page labels it as such.

What the growth-plate evidence actually shows

Growth plates are real, and the instinct that less movement protects them is not supported: the one prospective cohort to measure early-life exercise against hip radiographs found free off-lead exercise protective and daily stairs harmful.

PDSA puts the physiology plainly. A puppy's growth plates need to fuse before they are ready for high intensity exercise and high impact activities, and over-exercise risks damage to those plates and joints. That is the uncontested part. What is contested is which activities count.

A Norwegian team followed 501 dogs from 103 litters of four large breeds, 125 Newfoundlands, 133 Labrador Retrievers, 180 Leonbergers and 63 Irish Wolfhounds, from birth to official radiographic screening for hip dysplasia at 12 or 18 months. On radiographic evaluation, 123 of the 501 dogs, 24.6 percent, were classified as affected. In the final multivariable model, daily use of stairs from birth until 3 months of age carried an odds ratio of 1.96 (95 percent confidence interval 1.14 to 3.35, P=0.015), while daily off-leash exercise in a park from birth until 3 months of age carried an odds ratio of 0.31 (95 percent confidence interval 0.15 to 0.65, P=0.002). Birth on a farm rather than in an urban or suburban single-family home carried 0.34.

The authors' own conclusion is unambiguous: puppies of three months or less should not be allowed access to stairs, but should be allowed outdoor exercise on soft ground in moderately rough terrain, to decrease the risk of developing radiographically detectable hip dysplasia.

The systematic review reaches the same place from the other direction and adds the caution. It finds that exercise levels and types, specifically naming chasing balls and toys and regularly playing with other dogs, throughout life but particularly when young, are risk factors for joint disease development, due to over-use of and damage to developing joints. Then it says plainly that 77 percent of the underlying studies are retrospective and fundamentally unable to show causality. Both halves belong on the page. The direction of the evidence is consistent; its strength is moderate.

What this means in an Indian flat

An Indian flat removes the protective variable and supplies the harmful one. The protective exposure in the Norwegian cohort was soft, uneven, self-paced ground; a two-bedroom flat in Chennai or Pune offers vitrified tile, and the nearest grass may be a society lawn that bans dogs. The harmful exposure was daily stairs, and a walk-up building in Kolkata or Ahmedabad supplies four flights twice a day from the week the puppy arrives.

1. Carry a large-breed puppy up and down for the first three months if your building has no lift. This is the clearest single instruction the evidence supports.
2. Find earth or grass, even a small patch, and let the puppy move on it at its own pace without a lead where that is safe. Fifteen unstructured minutes on uneven ground is worth more than thirty structured ones on tarmac.
3. Lay mats or rugs on the routes the puppy runs indoors, because a puppy sprinting on polished tile is doing the opposite of self-paced movement on soft ground.
4. Stop the fetch habit early. Repeated ball chasing with skids and turns is named in the review and is the easiest thing on this list to give up.
5. Ask about the hips before you buy, because breed and litter mattered more in the model than anything an owner does. The screening, the grades and the Indian costs are on hip dysplasia in dogs and elbow dysplasia in dogs.

Breed and build: the Indie, the Labrador, the Pug and the Spitz are not one dog

Breed changes the answer more than age does, and for one group it sets a hard ceiling: a flat-faced dog's limit is its airway, not its enthusiasm.

Published breed exercise bands do exist, from one breed body, and they are already set out with their Indian reading on things to do with your dog in India, which carries the band for the Labrador Retriever, the German Shepherd, the Beagle and the Pug alongside the heat odds for each. That page also records the honest gap: the Indian native dog has no exercise band published by any breed body, so nobody can tell you an Indie's number either. The five Indian commerce sites ranking for that exact query give five different answers, between 45 minutes and two hours, and none of them cites anything.

What this page adds is the ceiling, because for one group of dogs the number is set by anatomy and has been measured.

The flat-faced ceiling, measured

The Finnish Kennel Club has screened brachycephalic breeds for breeding since 2017 using a 1,000 metre walk test. Of 957 dogs tested between 2017 and 2022, 94 percent passed the exercise component, 5 percent failed and 1 percent discontinued for reasons unrelated to the airway. Among English Bulldogs, 245 were tested, 213 passed, and 28, which is 11 percent, failed. Four percent of French Bulldogs and 3 percent of Pugs failed, and none of the other breeds failed.

Read those failure rates carefully before they reassure you. These were dogs brought forward for breeding approval, and the authors note that dogs showing moderate signs may have performed better in the test with their owner present in a relaxed environment. The population is selected and the setting is favourable. Eleven percent of English Bulldogs still could not walk a kilometre inside twelve minutes and recover.

That last row is the sentence this page exists to write. The standard European assessment of whether a flat-faced dog can manage a kilometre on foot specifies an ambient temperature of 15 to 25 degrees C. In Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Ahmedabad that band is not available outdoors for most of the year, and in the humid coastal cities the thermometer understates the problem because wet air blunts panting. Your Pug's real ceiling in May is lower than any published test would record, and it is lower on a humid day than a dry one at the same temperature. The city-by-city hours, the pavement test and the heat-illness odds by breed are on heat safety for dogs in India, and whether your own dog's breathing needs assessing at all is on brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome in dogs.

Coat is the other build variable, and it works differently. A heavily coated Spitz, Pomeranian or Indian-bred Husky is not airway-limited and is perfectly capable of wanting a long walk. Its constraint is heat dumping through a double coat in Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu, which means the total can stay high while the session length comes down and the number of sessions goes up. A brachycephalic dog and a heavy-coated dog need opposite adjustments to the same hot afternoon: the Pug's total should fall, the Spitz's total can hold if you split it.

Life stage: the puppy, the adult and the senior

Life stage changes the shape of the dose more than its total: a puppy needs it broken into pieces, an adult needs it steady, and a senior needs it little and often.

The three stages are listed below with what the evidence supports for each, and with the parts that belong to other pages marked. Senior dog exercise is the stage where the published advice goes quietest, and that silence is itself informative.

• Puppy, to the end of growth. Cap the structured lead walking, protect the free self-paced movement on soft ground, and keep the puppy off stairs for the first three months if it is a large breed. Several short sessions beat one long one, because puppies have more energy than adult dogs and require more exercise in short bursts. The British median at 16 weeks was 45 minutes of total weekday walking, and that is a reference point rather than a target.
• Adult, from the end of growth to the senior years. Steady, daily, and varied in type. The measured British median at 15 months is an hour and a half on a weekday, most commonly split into two walks. PDSA's figure of one to two hours for some breeds sits in the same range.
• Senior, the last quarter of expected life. Little and often is best, as joints get stiffer when they have not been used for a bit, in PDSA's words, and an older dog still needs the opportunity to get outdoors every day to sniff, stretch their legs and get some fresh air. Keep to a fairly short route, keep games low so the dog does not jump or twist, and stop when the dog lies down on a walk or stops chasing a toy.

Notice what PDSA does not do for the senior dog: it gives no minutes figure at all. That is consistent with everything else on this page. What an old dog can do depends on its joints, its heart and its airway, and the screening that tells you which of those is limiting is on senior dog care in India. If the slowing is arthritis rather than age, the exercise plan is part of the treatment rather than a separate question, and arthritis in dogs and cats covers that.

One finding sits across all three stages and cuts against the instinct that more is always better. In a Finnish survey of pet dogs, dogs that exercised 1-2 hours or 2-3 hours a day were less fearful toward thunder than dogs that exercised more than 3 hours a day, at odds ratios of 0.83 (P=0.0412) and 0.78 (P=0.008) respectively, in a model of 6,945 dogs. In the same study, daily exercise was not associated with fear of surfaces and heights at all.

Do not over-read it. The study is cross-sectional, so the arrow could point either way: a household with a fearful dog may walk it more to settle it, and the breeds that routinely get more than three hours a day are not a random sample of dogs. What the finding does rule out is the idea that the behavioural benefit of exercise rises without limit. The same paper's results on how often a dog trains or takes part in activities, which is a different variable, are already published on things to do with your dog in India, and this page does not repeat them.

Signs of too little, and the half nobody writes about too much

Read the dog instead of a chart, because the signs of too little and the signs of too much are both visible at home, and only one of the two gets written about.

Search for signs of too little exercise and you will find lists of six, seven and eight items. Read them and you will notice two things. They agree with each other almost word for word, and not one of them carries a denominator or a source. They are a shared folk list, and the items on it are real enough to be worth knowing and too general to diagnose anything.

They are also incomplete in a specific way. Boredom, under-exercise, frustration and separation distress produce overlapping behaviour and need opposite responses, which is why labelling the state matters more than the list of fixes. That distinction, and the table that separates the four, is on dog boredom and enrichment in India. What follows here is only the exercise half.

The two columns overlap on purpose. A dog that paces at night, pulls on the lead and cannot settle is the classic picture of too little exercise, and it is also the picture of a dog that is run hard every day and never comes down. Guessing between them by adding another half hour is how households end up with a fitter, faster, more aroused dog and the same problem.

Recovery is the test you can actually run

Borrow the breeding test's recovery criterion and use it as a weekly check. Bring the dog in, put it somewhere cool, and look at the clock. The published standard asks a dog to return to its pre-walk heart rate, body temperature and general condition within 15 minutes. You are not going to take a rectal temperature after every walk, and you do not need to. If your dog is reliably settled and breathing normally inside a quarter of an hour, the session was within its fitness. If it is not, the session was too long, too fast, too hot, or all three. Heat is the commonest of those three in India and is covered city by city on heat safety for dogs in India.

The over-exercised and chronically aroused dog

This is the half that Indian pet content skips entirely. Two pieces of evidence point at it. The systematic review names exercise levels and types, specifically repeated ball and toy chasing and rough play with other dogs, as risk factors for joint disease through over-use and damage to developing joints. The Finnish survey found the dogs exercised more than three hours a day were the most fearful of thunder, not the least.

Add the pattern any trainer will recognise. A dog taken out for a hard, fast, high-arousal session every single day gets fitter, and a fitter dog needs more of the same session to reach the same tiredness. The household escalates, the dog's resting arousal rises, and the sleep that should be putting the day away gets shorter. The fix is not more minutes. It is swapping some of the fast minutes for slow, self-paced, sniffing ones and protecting the sleep.

Sleep is the measurement almost no Indian owner takes

Count your dog's sleep before you change its exercise, because sleep is the one quantity you can measure at home and the published figures disagree with each other by six hours.

The largest cohort that has asked the question put it to owners of dogs at two ages. At 16 weeks, 2,332 owners answered the sleep questions; at 12 months, 1,091 did. The reported mean total sleep in 24 hours was 11.2 hours (SD 2.9) at 16 weeks and 10.8 hours (SD 2.7) at 12 months. The median daytime sleep was 3.5 hours at 16 weeks and 3.0 hours at 12 months, and the mean night-time sleep was 7.0 and 7.3 hours.

Now hold those beside the pages ranking in India for the same question. They say most dogs sleep 12 to 16 hours a day and puppies up to 20, or 12 to 14 hours, or 18 to 20 hours for a puppy, or an average of 10. The cohort found 11.2 and 10.8. The disagreement is not small and it is not resolvable by averaging, so this page publishes both sides and the reason for the gap.

The gap has two plausible causes and both matter. The cohort figures are owner estimates, and the authors are explicit that owners within the Generation Pup cohort reported more daytime sleep and similar night-time sleep compared with previous studies. The higher figures circulating online mostly trace back to observational and laboratory work on kennelled or instrumented dogs, where a dog has less to do. An owner is also bad at counting sleep they are not present for. In the cohort, only 58.1 percent of owners, 1,354 of 2,332, could give even an approximate range for their 16-week puppy's daytime sleep, and that fell to 48.6 percent, 530 of 1,091, by 12 months. Put the other way: 41.9 percent of owners, 978 of 2,332, could not estimate it at all.

That is the real finding for a reader in India. The number is uncertain because almost nobody is counting, and you can fix that for your own dog in a week.

How to count it, in an Indian household

1. Pick a normal week. Not a festival week, not a week with guests, not the week you changed the walk.
2. Write two numbers a day on the fridge or a phone note: roughly how many hours the dog was asleep between waking and bedtime, and roughly how many overnight.
3. Count the naps the dog takes in company, because an Indian household is rarely empty and a dog that dozes through the afternoon with the family around is sleeping.
4. Average the seven days. You now have a baseline, which is more than most owners have.
5. Re-count after any change to the exercise, the routine or the household. A number that drops by two hours is telling you something a behaviour list cannot.

Two Indian specifics are worth naming. In a flat where the dog sleeps in the living room, the household's own late evening is the dog's sleep window, and a family that eats at ten and watches television until midnight is shortening it. And in a humid coastal summer in Mumbai or Chennai, a dog that cannot get comfortable will sleep in short broken pieces, which looks like restlessness and is actually heat. Moving the bed to a tiled floor under a fan is an exercise intervention, even though it changes no minutes.

Heat, air and rain decide when you walk, not whether

In India the weather decides the timing of the dose rather than its size, and four separate constraints close the window at different points in the year.

Walk timing in India is set by the weather rather than by the clock on an exercise chart, and this is the part a foreign chart cannot help with. It is also the part Indian commercial pages get wrong in a way that is almost funny. Purina India's own page, on its Indian domain, advises limiting the walk when winter days get particularly cold and icy, says that if temperatures get below freezing it is best to keep the dog active indoors, and tells readers to protect their dog's paws from ice and salt. That is British copy, served to a reader in Hyderabad.

Four constraints matter in India, and each has its own page on this site. This page owns the dose and the scheduling, not the constraints themselves.

Take each of those to the page that owns it rather than guessing. The city-by-city coolest hour, the pavement test and the alert that cancels the walk altogether are on heat safety for dogs in India. The dark walk, the visibility problem and the thermal lag after sunset are on night walks and street safety in India. Air quality, including the trailing-average finding that changes when you should stay in, is on air pollution and your pet in India. The rains are on monsoon care for dogs in India.

Protect the total, move the parts

The practical rule is short. Heat, air and rain are arguments about timing, and only heat is ever an argument about total. When the window narrows, keep the weekly total where it was and change the shape.

• Split rather than cut. Two twenty-minute walks in the cool hours beat one forty-minute walk in a warm one, and the split is better for a flat-faced or senior dog in any case.
• Drop intensity before you drop duration. A slow sniffing route at the same length costs the dog far less heat than a brisk one, and it is a different and useful type of session rather than a consolation prize.
• Move minutes indoors on a closed day, and treat the indoor session as real rather than as a stopgap. What to do with it is on dog boredom and enrichment in India.
• Hold the food steady and watch the scale, because a wet fortnight in Maharashtra or Karnataka with the same bowl and half the walk shows up on the dog within a month. Why that matters is on obesity in dogs and cats.
• Plan the hot months in February. The households that cope are the ones that moved the walk before they had to, not the ones that discovered in May that 7 am no longer works.

Regional differences are real and they run opposite ways. In dry inland cities such as Delhi and Ahmedabad the pre-dawn hour is genuinely cool and the problem is the afternoon. In the humid coastal belt, Mumbai, Chennai and much of Tamil Nadu and coastal Karnataka, the thermometer reads lower while the dog cools worse, because wet air blunts the evaporation that panting depends on. In Bengaluru and Pune the window is wider than most of the country and owners over-estimate it on the few genuinely hot weeks. In Kolkata the monsoon takes more days off the calendar than the heat does.

How to set your own dog's dose in two weeks

To set your own dog's dose, measure what it currently gets, change one thing a week, and judge the change on sleep, settle and recovery rather than on hitting somebody else's number.

The protocol below takes two weeks and costs nothing. It is written for a healthy adult dog. For a puppy, read the growth-plate section first; for a senior or a flat-faced dog, run it past your vet before you start.

1. Week one, change nothing and write it down. Minutes out, roughly what the dog did, and the hour of day. Most owners discover the real total is not what they assumed.
2. Count sleep in the same week, two numbers a day, day and night, and average the seven days.
3. Weigh the dog and score its body condition by hand, ribs under the fingers and a waist behind them. Note both.
4. Time the recovery once, after the usual walk. Cool room, clock running, how long to settled and breathing normally. Fifteen minutes is the published benchmark.
5. Week two, change exactly one dial. Add fifteen minutes, or convert fifteen fast minutes to slow sniffing ones, or split one walk into two. One dial, not three.
6. Re-measure the same four things at the end of week two: total minutes, sleep average, weight, recovery time.
7. Keep the change if the evening settles and sleep holds or rises. Reverse it if sleep falls, recovery lengthens, or the dog is stiff on rising.
8. Repeat monthly, and expect the answer to move with the season rather than staying fixed, because the window moves and so does the dog.

Two things will make this fail. Changing the walk and the food in the same fortnight, which leaves you unable to read the scale. And judging a change on the dog's enthusiasm, which is the least reliable instrument on the dog: a Labrador will take a fourth walk and a Pug will try to follow you into the afternoon sun.

Take the whole record to your vet at the annual check, and ask them to look at it alongside the physical examination. A written fortnight of minutes, sleep, weight and recovery is more useful in a consulting room than any chart on the internet, because it is about your dog. If the numbers move in the wrong direction without you changing anything, that is the appointment to bring forward.