Dog walking as a hobby and profession: a bibliographic study of the professional activities of dog walkers

Abstract

It is notable that physical activity has benefits for the health of the body and mind. This is no different for animals, especially those that are classified as pets. Walking and running bring similar benefits to pets and their owners. Due to this, the performance of such activities has gained great importance with the change in the view in relation to animals: before they were only work and guard instruments, today they are members of the family. A new professional modality has been developed, the dog walker, whose function is to promote animal health through work with animals, such activities that cannot be routinely performed with their owners. Therefore, a study was carried out with a bibliographic review design, using the databases: Pubmed, Scopus, PsyInfo, in addition to the Latin American databases LILACS and Scielo. The search was conducted between 2000 and 2023. The search strategy used the descriptors “dog walker” and “professional activity” combined with the Boolean operator AND, without adding search filters. Among all the databases analyzed, none of them, after the screening process, presented content that could be eligible for inclusion, proving the lack of research in the general scope of the academic environment. The term “Dog Walking” presented a large number of results found, however, even in this way, after all the filtering and analysis, it showed a lack of eligible research and content, showing, again, great possibilities for studies. The term Dog Walking proved to be more promising in an initial numerical analysis, but also zeroed its correspondents after the final screening, also proving the need and possibility of new research in the area.

Keywords: pets, walking, profession.

DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/15-2-07

Publication date: March 30^th 2025