Hot Weather Dog Training: What to Do When It Is Too Hot to Walk

Half past nine at night and the patio is still holding twenty four degrees. The lead has been hanging on the hook by the back door since Tuesday. Your dogs found the coolest strip of floor in the house hours ago and have not moved off it since, and you are stood in the kitchen doing the sums again, working out whether there is any window at all today where going out would be safe.

Then the guilt arrives from both directions. Skip it and you are the owner who does nothing. Go anyway and you are the owner who took a working dog out onto hot tarmac.

There is a middle ground, and it is far bigger and far more useful than most people realise.

Everything in this post comes from my conversation with LWDG Group Expert Abi Reed on episode 215 of Found It, Fetched It.

Your dogs are not being lazy in this heat, they are reading it correctly

Abi has spent most of this summer watching her Labradors do absolutely nothing. Asleep all day while she has been at home. Out in the garden, they take themselves straight to the shade. Nothing shifts them, apart from the sound of a sweetie wrapper, which is a Labrador problem rather than a heat problem.

Mine are the same. Rex has strong opinions about which part of the house he is prepared to be in, and the quarry tiles in the porch win every time because they sit in direct contact with the earth underneath. Arthur wants to be near me, so he compromises, gives up his usual rug and settles on the vinyl instead. That is home until the sun goes down.

They are not opting out. They are doing the only sensible thing available to them, because they cannot shed heat the way you can. You sweat across your whole body. They pant, and they lose a little through their paws, and that is more or less it.

Abi has been getting up at twenty five to five to walk before the sun properly comes up. The evening, which used to be the easy answer, has stopped working. In Hertfordshire this summer it was still in the high twenties at nine and ten at night, after a day that peaked at thirty nine, with the overnight temperature never dropping below twenty three or twenty four. If twenty four in the daytime already makes you think twice, it deserves the same caution at ten at night, and by then your dogs have a whole hot day behind them as well.

Key takeaway: Stop waiting for the evening to cool off and testing it every couple of hours. Move the whole routine to before the sun comes up, and let the rest of the day be a rest day.

Put your hand flat on the ground before you decide anything

Air temperature is the number everybody quotes and the ground is the thing that actually burns. Tarmac and concrete take the heat in all day and then throw it straight back up. Abi tells people to put a hand flat on the ground and hold it there, because that is the surface your dogs are walking on with their pads while you are stood on top of it in shoes.

Her rule while it is like this is simple. Do not go anywhere near tarmac or concrete. As she puts it, no dog has ever got into trouble by not being walked because it was too hot. Plenty of them get into serious trouble the other way round.

I watched that happen once at a game fair. It was a member’s dog, and she was not doing anything anyone would look twice at. The dog collapsed with heat exhaustion out of nowhere and it was terrifying to be near.

The thing that catches people out is using themselves as the gauge. You are coping, so you assume the dogs are coping, and the two are not connected. They are working with a completely different cooling system and they are the ones with no shoes on.

Key takeaway: Your own comfort is not the measurement. Kneel down, put your hand on the surface, and let that answer the question.

The car is the part almost everybody forgets

The plan sounds careful enough. It is too hot on the pavements, so you will drive somewhere with grass and shade and do it properly. Then the dogs go in the back of the truck, you crack the windows open, and off you go.

Abi’s point is that an open window is not air conditioning. Try driving in thirty odd degrees with the windows down and no air con and see how hot your own cab stays. Now put that behind you, in a metal box, with no through draught worth the name. By the time you reach the field they are already boiling, and you have not started training yet.

The bit that should stop you is the journey going wrong. One tractor, one closed lane, one set of temporary lights, and you are sat still with dogs cooking behind you and nothing you can do about it.

Abi is buying an air conditioning unit for the back of her cab this year, and I think a lot of us will end up doing the same. Air con has been standard across Europe for decades. We are only now catching up with the idea that we might need it here too, for the dogs as much as for us.

Key takeaway: If the journey to the field costs your dogs more than the session gives them, the session is not worth having. Stay home and train there instead.

Everything that matters happens within a metre of you

Abi says this constantly, and this is the summer it earns its keep. The metre of space around you as a handler is the most important space you have. Almost nothing your dogs genuinely need from you requires them to run anywhere at all.

Inside that metre, in your own house, you have heel work, recall, sit and stays, delivery, hold, turning, and every bit of manners you have been meaning to tidy up. That is seven things, none of which need a field.

Arthur has a thing about shoes, so in the evening I put a pile of Crocs in the porch and he brings them to me one at a time, gets a thank you and a fuss, and goes back for the next. He thinks it is a brilliant game. What it actually is, is repetition of the behaviour I want most, which is that when you have got something, you bring it to me. Abi does the same thing with the post. She taught Weston, Friz and Snoopy to pick it up off the mat, because going away from her, picking something up and bringing it back is delivery, whatever the object is.

Weston is eleven months old and his delivery was messy. All over the place. So Abi spent the summer working on it in the garage, where he cannot build up any speed and cannot take himself off anywhere, and she slowed the whole thing right down to one piece. Dummy on the floor, bring it here, give it to me, done, treat. Now it is turning up in his evening sessions outside without her asking for it, and she puts that squarely down to having been forced to stop doing full marks and memories for a few weeks.

She also stands on a single quarry tile in her kitchen and practises turning at heel. That is a fundamental piece of a finished gundog, being taught on one floor tile.

Key takeaway: Pick the one part of one exercise that has always been scrappy, and give it the fortnight indoors it has never had.

There are no rabbits running around your kitchen

Training indoors is not the watered down version of the real thing. It is the version where your dogs can actually concentrate. Nothing is running, nothing is blowing about, no scent trails cutting across the floor. They get to think, and land on the feeling of knowing this one.

Most handlers relax indoors too, and that changes everything. Your dogs cannot run off, because there is nowhere to go, so you stop bracing for it. You have their whole attention and they have yours. Abi is clear that this will not be as sharp the moment you step back outside, but if you have already taught them what you want, your chances out there are far better than if you were teaching it and fighting the environment at the same time.

If you have more than one dog, put the older ones to work. Abi’s ten year olds hold a sit stay in the room while she trains the youngsters, and they think the whole thing is about them. They are being the distraction, and enjoying being included.

It works the other way round in my house. Out on the field Rex is switched on and working, and Arthur reads that as competition and gets tight about it. Indoors Rex is flat out and snoring, so Arthur can work next to him with none of that pressure sitting on him.

Then you layer it. Kitchen first. Garden next, in the shade or before the sun comes up, where there are a few more distractions but nothing like a field. Then the real world once the weather lets you. We had a pen on the farm when Dad was alive, built out of solid sided Harris fencing so a young dog could be outside without being able to see out of it. Most of us do not have that, me included now, and you do not need it. You are just building the same halfway step with whatever environment you can control.

Key takeaway: Kitchen, then garden, then the field. Same exercise, three settings, in that order.

Water cools them down, it does not cancel out the heat

Water is the thing everyone reaches for, and it does work, up to a point. They get in, they cool off, that part is real. What it does not do is change the air they come back out into. They are still panting, still trying to lose heat, and if you are stood in the shade watching them run back to you through full sun, they are having a harder time of it than you are.

Abi has done plenty of water work this summer, but never endlessly. Two or three retrieves and that dog is done, put away, and the next one comes out. Swimming is genuinely tiring. Dogs need to be swimming fit the same way you do, and anyone who has got back in a pool after a few years off knows how quickly half a length becomes enough.

There is a training cost too, if you are careless with it. Keep chucking things in and letting them charge headlong after every splash, and a splash starts to mean retrieve. Your steadiness goes ropey and you will be unpicking that in the autumn. Be structured around water rather than throwing things in on a whim.

The fix is a separate cue. If your working cue sends them in for a retrieve, do not use it when you are just letting them muck about. Give them a different word for going in to play, so getting into the water is still something they did because you said so.

Reading them matters more than any rule about minutes. Watch the eyes, watch for the tongue lolling out to the side, watch for short rapid breathing. That is not the point where you start thinking about stopping, that is the point you should never have reached. Telling a genuinely hot dog from one who is simply enjoying themselves comes down to knowing your own. Abi’s Sherman will do figures of eight for a quarter of an hour long after he has cooled down, purely because he likes it, and she lets him get on with it. That is a different animal to the one refusing to come out when you have asked.

Watch the drinking as well, in the water and afterwards. Too much and it comes straight back up, and then they have lost the hydration they went in for. Salt water is worse, as anyone whose dog has decided the sea looks refreshing will tell you.

Key takeaway: Two or three retrieves, then out and away. Water is a cooling tool with a ceiling, not a way round the weather.

Questions people ask about training in hot weather

Am I a bad owner if I skip walks for a week?

No. Abi’s line on this is worth keeping. No dog has ever got into trouble by not being walked because it was too hot, and plenty get into trouble the other way round. Your dogs have already made the same decision themselves, which is why they are asleep on the coolest floor in the house. Missing a week of walks in a heatwave costs them nothing at all.

Is it too hot to train, or just too hot to walk?

Just too hot to walk. Training and walking are two different things, and this is the summer that difference becomes obvious. Heel work, recall, sit and stays, delivery, hold, turning and manners all happen inside a metre of you, indoors, in the cool. The only thing you have lost is distance work.

My dog is a working breed and gets wound up without a proper run. Will indoor training be enough?

Watch what they actually choose when it is thirty degrees. Abi’s dogs go and lie in the shade and stay there. They are not asking for a run, you are assuming they need one. A focused indoor session is real work, and because there is nothing competing for their attention, you tend to get a better quality of it than you would in a field.

Is the evening safer than the morning?

Not this year. Abi found evenings in Hertfordshire still sitting in the high twenties at nine and ten at night, and your dogs have a whole hot day behind them by that point rather than a cool night. Early morning, before the sun is properly up, is the safer end of the day.

How do I know if they are overheating or just enjoying the water?

You know your own dogs, and that genuinely is the answer. A dog doing lazy laps for the fun of it looks nothing like a dog struggling. The signs to act on are the eyes, the tongue hanging out to the side, and short rapid breaths. If you are seeing those, you have already gone too far, so build in stopping points before you get anywhere near them.

Hot weather does not mean no training, it means different training

If you have had one of those moments this summer where you cancelled a walk because you honestly did not know what was safe, for them or for you, you are nowhere near the only one. There is nothing to feel ashamed of in that. The information out there contradicts itself constantly and you have been trying to make a sensible call in the middle of it.

So take the decisions back. Read the ground before you read the forecast. Move the routine to before the sun comes up. Look at the car properly, not as transport but as another hot box. Use the water with a limit on it. And bring the rest of it indoors, into the metre around you, where the concentration is better anyway.

Our members have between sixty and a hundred quick exercises sat in the Study Hub for exactly this. Type quick exercises into the search and they are all there, ready to go, none of them needing a field.

Pick one thing that has always been a bit scrappy, and work on it in your kitchen this week while everyone else waits for the weather.

Tags:

• Found It Fetched It
• Gundog Training
• heat safety for dogs
• high-drive dogs
• hot weather dog training
• indoor dog training
• LWDG
• summer dog training
• water retrieves
• Working Dog Training

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