If you live in Australia, exercising your dog may soon be a requirement as opposed to an option. The RSPCA is proposing new laws to be implemented, requiring that dogs are walked at least once a day, have adequate food and water, and are not chained up. Dog owners could face fines of up to $12,000 and even jail time for failing to comply with the laws if they get passed.

Personally, I think that these new dog exercise laws, if passed, would definitely be a big step in the right direction. However, we’d have to look at different kinds of scenarios when it comes to dog exercise. For example, a disabled or elderly person may not be able to walk their dog outside every day. But if the dog is a Chihuahua, which doesn’t require massive amounts of exercise anyway, and the owner plays fetch with it in the backyard and provides suitable companionship and exercise on the property, once can hardly call this maltreatment. So there should be workarounds in the law for these types of cases. For the majority, however – I totally agree with enforcing fines to make sure that dogs are walked daily. For many breeds even a daily walk may not be enough when it comes to dog exercise, but it’s certainly a whole lot better than nothing.

Dog exercise comes with the territory of owning a dog. It’s about time more people realized that dogs aren’t furniture or goldfish which you feed once a day and started taking proper care of their pets.