The thing about 5mins per month walk for a young dog . . .

[Takver]

Purely curiosity, since ddog is 14 and his puppy days are well and truly past!

I've seen the reference to this being on-lead walks only, but does it also refer to young dogs running around on their own / with another dog? Just wondering, because ddog used to run for miles, I'm sure, if you'd actually put a pedometer on him dashing back & forth & playing with his sister (we were on a farm in southern Spain, so literally hectares of scrubland available to him). Is that not a problem, and if not why not? And come to that, how do you stop a 7 or 8 month old dog tearing around in circles & turning somersaults . . .

You walk them by themselves so they can't get over excited and tear around, so they can go at their own pace and rest when they want to. Pups need one to one training time to bond with the humans over the other dog anyway.

Sorry, wasn't clear - we didn't have two dogs, we were in a car free village & his sister lived nearby with neighbours. So plenty of one to one time, but when they & us were around the dogs used to tear around & play a lot. I'm quite sure we did things all wrong - took on ddog because he was about to go to a supposed 'rescue' which we had a strong hunch shipped the dogs off for vivisection :( - so we figured we'd do our best for him. Just in the nature of where we lived, there were no fences & we jst taught him not to go in the direction of the road, so he would roam pretty freely otherwise, & we'd whistle for him whenever anything interesting was happening!

Interested in this too as we had dogs in the countryside too when growing up and they just roamed free and walked as much as they wanted, within the fenced area. Certainly more than the 5 min x month. Now with a dog in a city I am very confused as what to do.

That's it, WildIridescence. I work outside all day - it would seem counter intuitive to me to leave a puppy at home rather than have it outdoors with me, but I can't imagine one only running around for 20 minutes out of the day.

I'm sure one of the vet's on here ,think it's Lonecat says the policy is not set in stone but applies more to big breeds of dog and that controlling weight is far more important. If we'd kept to that with our Border Collie both him and us would be tearing our hair out. He's certainly on more than fifty minutes at 10 months old.
It's not something I'd heard of before coming on here, had a grand total of 3 labs, 1 springer and 2 border collies (not at the same time) and have never restricted their walks with no problems, even in old age, although I accept that this is purely anecdotal and they were all from working strains so perhaps less prone to joint problems.

Its tricky isn't it - we didn't walk ddog on lead much at all as a puppy/young dog (basically only enough to teach him to walk politely), but it didn't seem to be something that was known, certainly in Spain, when he was young.