A walking plan built around your pet's actual body

It depends on weight, breed and age rather than on a single rule. A healthy adult of average build typically needs 30 to 90 minutes a day, but a flat-faced breed is capped near 20 minutes, a senior near 40, and a puppy at roughly five minutes per month of age. The calculator on this page works out the figure for your specific animal, including the distance in kilometres.

Start from the safe rate of loss — about 1% of body weight a week for dogs and 0.5% for cats — convert that to a weekly calorie deficit at 7,700 kcal per kilogram of fat, then split it between movement and food. Walking typically supplies about a third. This page does the whole calculation from your pet's current and target weight.

For a 30 kg dog on a weight-loss plan, roughly 3.8 km a day. Smaller dogs need less distance but pay more energy per kilogram to cover it, and short-legged breeds spend about twice what long-limbed breeds do over the same ground. The planner returns a distance rather than a range.

Mental stimulation games like scent tracking, towel unrolling burritos, muffin tin puzzles, and crinkle paper bag tunnels burn high energy fast without requiring outdoor space or warm weather.

Yes, and it needs no sign-up. Everything runs in your browser, the figures are not sent anywhere, and you can download the finished plan as an image.

Yes. Cats are planned as short bursts of play rather than walks, held to half the weekly weight-loss rate a dog gets, because losing weight too quickly can cause hepatic lipidosis in cats.

A 30 kg dog reaching 26 kg takes around 15 weeks at the safe rate; a 6 kg cat reaching 4.5 kg takes around 58 weeks. The timeline compounds, because a percentage of body weight shrinks as the animal does, and the planner accounts for that instead of dividing the excess by this week's loss.