Tails, trails and treats: Inside the nation’s love affair with the dog walk

Ask a dog owner to name the best part of their day and a fair few will nod towards the lead hanging by the door. New research, conducted in July 2026 by Animal Friends Pet Insurance, which surveyed 1,800 dog owners across the UK, found that 76% count walking their dog among the highlights of the day. And when it comes to choosing where to go, 95% put their dog’s enjoyment on a par with, or above, their own.

The same survey sketched the anatomy of a perfect walk: a shade over an hour long with 16 interesting things to sniff. Most of us fall short. Two-thirds of owners stick to the same familiar loops out of convenience, and nearly four in five feel a pang of guilt about not being more adventurous. The walk does us as much good as it does them: owners rank exercise, a happy dog and fresh air as the biggest benefits.

For Big Issue vendors, though, the daily walk isn’t something to feel guilty about. It’s part of the shape of the day itself – and their dogs aren’t only companions but colleagues, out on the pitch with them in all weathers.

Take Clive Rowe, who sells the magazine in Plymouth with Geezer, his 17-year-old dog (and local legend), never far from his feet. Their walk of choice is the Plym Valley trail at Marsh Mills, just outside the city, where the river threads between a steam railway and the boatyards of Princess Yachts.

“It’s really lovely through there,” he says. “There aren’t many rivers you can truly walk along – normally they’ve got houses built right up to them.”

He is in no rush on these walks, which is exactly what the research says dogs want. “It’s good for both of us – it’s the highlight of our day,” he says.

“If Geezer wants to go and sniff something for five minutes, I’ll just stand there patiently, because when I want him to stop in the city centre while I talk to somebody, he always waits for me. So when it’s his time, I let him take as long as he likes.”

Geezer is slower these days but still clocks up five miles a day, and Clive is unsentimental about what that companionship has meant. “If it wasn’t for Geezer, I’d be dead by now,” he says. “I’d have happily drunk myself to death and smoked myself to death if I hadn’t got him and changed my ways. He’s my best companion, my bestest little mate.”

Just over 100 miles north-east, in Bath, vendor Ian Duff has his own Sunday ritual. He takes his dogs, Trigger and Marlene, along the Two Tunnels Greenway, the old railway line that runs out of the city towards Frome through two long walking tunnels; or he follows the Avon half the way to Bristol and catches the bus back when his legs give out.

“It’s good for both of us – it’s the highlight of our day. If Geezer wants to go and sniff something for five minutes, I let him take as long as he likes.”

“The dogs are with me most of the time – they come to work with me,” he says. “But it’s nice to do something that’s not work-based, just to do something for them. They get a good walk, and they get to meet other dogs, which is a real bonus.”

He does it religiously, he says – every weekend, bar the odd heatwave when it’s simply too hot to take the dogs out.

Neither route troubles the top of Animal Friends’ national list, which is crowned by the Rydal Water Circular in the Lake District, ahead of the New Forest’s Bolderwood Radnor Trail and Baggy Point on the South West Coast. But that’s rather the point.

The nation’s dream walk might be a Cumbrian tarn, yet the walks that actually carry people through the week are closer to home – a cycle path, a riverside trail near a Sainsbury’s or, in Geezer’s case, the city centre itself, still his hands-down favourite for the simple reason that it’s full of people to greet.

The list makes room for the odd urban surprise – a gentle circular around Wells Cathedral earns a place to prove a good walk needn’t mean a mountain – but the vendors’ picks are the real hidden gems: free, local, and treasured for reasons that are only partly to do with the scenery.

Animal Friends was founded in 1998 to support animal welfare and a pet’s wellbeing is very much part of that. What better way to improve wellbeing than a walk and some great enrichment for your dog?

Whether the walk of your dreams is Rydal Water or a well-worn loop by the river, the dog on the end of the lead doesn’t care about the ranking. They just want the walk and, most days, so do we.

To learn more, and to access a map that will help you find your perfect dog walk, head to animalfriends.co.uk/bigissue

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