Camping with dogs can be a great experience or it can be a royal pain. I have experienced both over the years with my two dogs. The more we have camped the more we have learned how to make things easier for us and more fun for the dogs. I have a 100 lb. yellow lab and an 80 lb. German shepherd who are great, but they are huge and take up a lot of space, they require lots of food and water each day, and have endless amount of energy. These are the 5 things that helped us make the most out of camping with dogs.
- Tie Outs- We have a fenced in yard at home and letting the dogs in and out is as easy as sliding open the door. At camp we obviously can’t do that. We try to be outside as much as we can at camp so tie outs are a must. When we get to camp one of the first things we do is pound in the stakes and hook the dogs up to their leads. I try give the dogs as much space as I can by placing them in the back of the camp so they end at the door to the camper. It makes it easy to let them out in the morning without having to get dressed and walk around camp. You will have to be careful, because dogs will always find a way get tangled up in things, but having ties outs makes camping so much easier for us.
2. Food Storage- Our dogs eat four cups of food each day. If we are planning to camp for a week that’s a lot of food to bring with. We have a big tub of food at home, but don’t have the space to put it at camp. With very limited storage space we needed to find a storage solution. Luckily, my wife loves all things organizing, so she took measurements and rearranged our storage so we could fit a weeks supply of food in a 2X2 foot space.
3. Extra Water- A large dog can drink about one gallon of water each day depending on their activity level. For us that’s at least two gallons of water each day. We do have a fresh water tank on our camper, but it is painfully slow to fill bowls and we only have a limited water supply. We ended up buying a 5-gallon water jug for the dogs. We can keep it outside near the dog bowls and refill it easily at any of the campgrounds wells or water faucets.
4. Foldable Kennel- If your tent or camper is secure enough you can probably do without a kennel, but we have a sneaky German Shepherd that needs to be contained if we aren’t with him. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy; I just use a foldable wire kennel that we already have. They make some pretty cool foldable fabric ones, but you can make do with something you already have. My wife and I were heading out one night to an open area so we could check out a comet that was visible, when we heard a commotion and a loud thud behind us. Turns out Vader didn’t want to be left behind and somehow he squeezed out between the front bed and the canvas of the popout. He fell four feet to the ground and luckily didn’t hurt himself. I’m just glad he did it while we were still there, otherwise we may have ended up being lost. He got to go see the comet with us, but now I make sure to pack a kennel every time we go camping.
5. Extra Towels- We always bring extra towels on our trips. We have a lab that absolutely loves the water. He will swim in anything, anytime, and not even think twice about it. The Mississippi River, Lake Michigan, ponds or streams, and any random puddle he sees he will swim in. It will also rain at some point on every trip we make, so between that and Luke swimming we will have wet dogs to deal with. We always keep a few old towels in the camper for those situations.
Hopefully this list helps you get started. There are plenty of other things that you will need or will want to bring with. Looking back at our previous trips and learning from our mistakes these made the biggest difference in improving our dog camping experience.
