Nature Deficit Disorder, has it gone to the Dogs?

"Since 2005, the number of studies of the impact of nature experience on human developed has grown from a handful to nearly one thousand.

By Dog Smart Training & Behaviour · Published 21 July 2026 · Reviewed 21 July 2026 · 13 min read

"Since 2005, the number of studies of the impact of nature experience on human developed has grown from a handful to nearly one thousand. This expanding body of scientific evidence suggests that nature-deficit disorder contributes to a diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, conditions of obesity, and higher rates of emotional and physical illnesses. Research also suggests that the nature-deficit weakens ecological literacy and stewardship of the natural world. These problems are linked more broadly to what health care experts call the “epidemic of inactivity,” and to a devaluing of independent play. Nonetheless, we believe that society’s nature-deficit disorder can be reversed"

Richard Louv

Before we delve to deeply into this, it’s important to understand NDD is not yet a recognised medical condition or diagnosis.

The term Nature Deficit Disorder was coined by the author Richard Louv in 2005 inside his publication “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.” and it is a registered trademark.

Richard is being specific toward children and now adults in his writingsand you can find out more here: https://richardlouv.com/blog/what-is-nature-deficit-disorder

One pilot study (ref 1) looked at young adults attending a four week wilderness camp, in a cell phone and computer free environment.

From the study:

Results. All nature-related measures—exposure, knowledge, skills, willingness to lead, perceived safety, sense of place, and nature connection—significantly increased.

Well-being outcomes also significantly improved, including perceived stress, relaxation, positive and negative emotions, sense of wholeness, and transcendence.

Physical activity and psychological measures showed no change. Interviews described how the wilderness environment facilitated social connections. Conclusion.

Findings illustrate the change in nature relations and well-being that wilderness camp experiences can provide

There is an increasing interest and uptake in parents’ home schooling, (home education) especially when it comes to Neurodivergent children, to allow them to explore life and their own abilities away from a strict curriculum of expectation, to remove exam culture in their learning journey. I am all for this, I was allowed these affordances as child, and I believe I am better off for it.

Yes, but this is about humans not dogs??

Let’s look at this, because in my observation all of these things are related to dogs and the behavioural issues, we are increasingly seeing in our modern world

Diminished use of the senses
Attention difficulties.
Obesity(ref 3)
higher rates of emotional and physical illness
Weakened ethological literacy(ref 4)this is a term reserved for humans but I believe part of this is relevant to dogs

The results of the study above may be about humans, but all of those improvements noted would benefit out dogs immensely.

(ref 8)Research has supported a number of parallels between dog-owner and child-parent relationships. The dog-owner bond, for example, fulfils the main characteristics of a human attachment bond*. In both species, behaviour problems and mental health problems are common and can significantly compromise psychological and emotional wellbeing. There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that the same factors that influence the occurrence of behaviour problems in humans may also have this effect in dogs*

All the studies I have seen relate to humans, but might this also be relevant to our dogs as well, world renowned applied ethologist, Kim Brophey seems to think so, as do I.

It would be great to see these studies extended into the canine world and i think these would be a feasible study to conduct.

Kim's LEGS model (ref 5) encompasses the very thing and offers a comprehensive way to evaluate out dogs rather than focusing on individual behavioural issues, first let’s focus on the individual themselves.

Learning
Environment
Genetics
Self

From the dogs truth site:

Just as is the case with any individual animal on Earth, dogs are biological animals whose behavior is the collective product of the interaction betweenNature AND Nurture**. It's not one or the other like you've been told. A dog's genetics do not predict their behavior, and it's not "all how you raise them".

Rather, it is a complex orchestra of elements designed to interact in cooperative harmony for organisms filling distinct niches in various ecosystems. Captivity and controlled breeding have interrupted this natural system of checks and balances, and THAT is what results in "behavior problems" in our modern pet dogs.

A mismatch or imbalance in any of the components of the four LEGS could indeed lead to the reason for behaviour issues or instabilities, and the LEGS are all connected, to the body of what is meant to be a dog.

Environment creates the affordances for Genetic behaviours to be released, Environment creates the affordances for relevant learning experiences to take place, and the expression of relevant Genetic behaviours (enrichment) and Learning that is relevant to succeed and navigate safely in life helps maintain a sense of self, Self-confidence, fulfilment, Self-care, happiness.

We must also remember that our dogs

do not exist on their own,

they share the experience of life with us,

what ails us may also affect them.

In a study (ref 2)Nature Deficit Disorder: what do four-year olds think about nature?

The children identified that 95% of all ‘nature,’ as dangerous but upon further analysis it became apparent that these were the opinions of the adults in their lives. The children identified sticks, muddy puddles and running as dangerous but simultaneously disputed their classification, protesting that it was the ‘grown ups’ that said they could not play with sticks or jump in puddles.

95% of all ‘nature,’ is dangerousthat misinformation is dangerous in itself!

(ref 2) Margaret McMillan (1919), a pioneer of the nursery school movement and early childhood education was a great advocate of children’s immersion in nature, she said.

‘The restless hands of toddlers should be occupied with access to open green spaces, trees to climb, ponds to wade in and wildlife to chase, in harmony with Nature's own scheme, gay as the butterflies or the blossoms that greet the sun”

It would be easy to change "toddler" to "dogs"

(ref 6) Social Learning Theory, proposed by Albert Bandura, posits that people learn through observing, imitating, and modelling others’ behaviour. This theory posits that we can acquire new behaviours and knowledge by watching others, a process known as vicarious learning.

Bandura emphasized the importance of cognitive processes in learning, which set his theory apart from traditional behaviourism.

He proposed that individuals have beliefs and expectations that influence their actions and can think about the links between their behaviour and its consequences.

But this is about people? What about dogs?

Anecdotally I can pluck stories for this, I will pick just two.

Harry drinking from a beach tree

Story 1

Social learning between the same species - intraspecific

Go back 15 years or so, my late rescue springer spaniel Sam, showed my current dog Briar at the time (at around 2yrs old) that water was accessible in the bow of beach trees, Sam passed away and Briar taught the dogs of my my friend Louise this little nature hack, all my existing dogs also know this fact and this information was gifted to them, from that original dog Sam, via the social learning of Briar, it serves me as a reminder of him whenever I see it occur.

This information could not have been exchanged without the environment providing opportunities for it to exist, and for exploration to take place, this information could better a dogs survival rate as it is gaining access to a primary reinforcer. (something that life requires, water)

What happens when you stand behind a back scratch!

Story 2

Social learning between the different species - interspecific.

Rufus the Airedale terrier, he came to me as an adolescent client dog, I witnessed several times, a strange back scratching behaviour, where the dogs usually back scratch their back legs across the floor, usually flinging dirt and grass into the air behind them as a way of casting scent, only when Rufus did it, his feet didn't touch the floor and this was consistent pattern in his behaviour, his feet never touched the floor.

At first my brain took me to think that a possible injury maybe part of this puzzle, my client didn't quite understand what I was talking about, so I demonstrated the action to her myself kicking my feet across the ground backwards proclaiming "it should look like this!", Rufus saw me do this and then he mimicked the behaviour himself, unlike before his feet actually made contact with the floor this time. I don't actually have a photo of this behaviour, but this is one of the after effect of Teak back scratching in my direction

Every time I saw him after that I was met with the comment "he still does that back scratching you taught him, he's never forgotten it”.

For social learning to happen, a social situation/environment must first exist and for us and our dogs it not just about each other, I particular like to watch the communication between the dogs and the horses at our training venue, they might not speak the same language but they are definitely communicating with each other, often the dogs that are totally unfamiliar with horses bark at them from a distance, the horses are used to this, they understand they are safe and we don't correct it, I often think the barks are the first interaction from the dog towards an unknown entity, sometimes apprehension, sometimes fear but very often communication, a line of enquiry a sputnik moment, a probe of inquisition.

(sputniks translation means "fellow traveller”)

"If I do this… "bark bark" what do you do as a result, are you friend or foe?

When it comes to dogs socializing with dogs, it is often said it’s better to do so in neutral territory, but I’d like to reframe that and say, it’s better to do so, in a natural environment, one that creates affordances for exploration together, for social learning about the environment and each other to take place.

My caveat here is that your local playing field is not a natural environment nor is being on a lead.

So why is NDD relevant? LEGS that's why!

The environment we use to facilitate learning matters.

Us humans are increasingly restrictive of our environments, partly because of technology, partly because of the pressure of society, partly because of the affordance we have for accessing natural environments and quite majorly, because of time.

As one example, we are so affected by our artificial environment that at some time during adolescence many of us even stop breathing correctly and favour chest breathing over abdominal breathing, because of the consciousness of our own body image. We change our own self in a negative way because of pressure from the environment around us (ref 7)

For many of us, deep breathing seems unnatural. There are several reasons for this. For one, body image has a negative impact on respiration in our culture. A flat stomach is considered attractive, so women (and men) tend to hold in their stomach muscles. This interferes with deep breathing and gradually makes shallow "chest breathing" seem normal, which increases tension and anxiety.

We crave convenience, why would we take a short car journey to go for a walk when we can access the same local park from our front door, why would we go to the bother of teaching our dogs the skills they need to enjoy relative freedom when we can use a lead or a longline, or dare I say it, a shock collar.

Why would we get wet and muddy when we can stay indoors or restrict ourselves to walking on the pavements and dog training in a village hall.

At some stage between childhood and adulthood, we seem to lose the desire to explore nature and the real world, and we foster a relationship with the artificial one instead, we seem to feel the world is looking in on us, rather than us looking out into it, but this desire is still relevant to our dogs.

If I had a pound for every client that said...

"I can’t get him to recall when the children are out with us, he just wants to be with them."

That`s because many of our dogs and many of our children exist on the same plane of life, one that is exploratory and filled with novelty and relevance, where us adults have kind of lost it, the kids are still in a world filled with chaos where we now crave for control, they are present in these moments where we are quite often disconnected them, with other thoughts running through our complicated minds

"What am I going to make for dinner, I better watch the time, my phone just made a noise, I need to get that work done by tomorrow, what’s that person looking at, how embarrassing?"

Us adults need to learn to switch modes of operation, to find our inner child, our inner dog and to give ourselves the time and space to be present in the moment and in nature, it’s a healer, its where we are from and really, it’s where we are meant to be.

Many of our dogs have been selectively bred to need less control than we place on them, they have been bred for cooperation not disconnection, to be able to express their behaviour in the environment they were designed to express their behaviour in and in a social context, they to have a need for fulfilment, internally they know they are good at doing certain things, just like we are and they don't need a manager that squashes this ability daily, just as we don't.

Dogs notice more about their environment, we need to learn to be able to take that natural world in as well, to be present, to stop moving every now and again and to attend to our senses.

(ref 8)Dogs showed more behaviour problems when there was a relative mismatch between owner and dog sensitivity, especially if the dog scored higher on this trait than the owner.

Maybe it’s not nature deficit disorder at all, maybe it’s a human deficit disorder, our world is evolving faster than we can keep up with it, maybe in this new environment we are forgetting what it is to be human, we get left behind, we are losing our sense of place in it, and you can pretty much bet our dogs, who are coming along for our ride are to.

To quote Andrew Hale "time and space"

We don't just need to give it to our dogs but allow it for ourselves as well.

Maybe its time to "Be more dog"