Dachshund Fourteen hours a day. That’s roughly how much sleep the average healthy adult dachshund logs, which leaves about ten waking hours to fill with opinions.
And dachshunds have opinions.
Here’s the part that usually gets missed. Owners spend those ten hours guessing: new toy, fancy treat, orthopedic bed with a memory foam insert and a faux sheepskin cover. The dog inspects it, blinks slowly, and goes to lie on a pile of warm laundry instead.
The things dachshunds genuinely love tend to be smaller, stranger, and significantly cheaper than the things we buy for them.
Some of it looks like misbehavior. Some of it looks like nothing at all.
Below are five of them.
1. Tunneling Into Absolutely Anything
Blankets. Couch cushions. That hoodie you left on the floor. A grocery bag, if standards have slipped.
If you own a dachshund, you have almost certainly sat down on a soft lump only to hear a muffled noise of protest from inside it.
This is not a quirk. It’s the single most hardwired thing about the breed, and it shows up in puppies who have never been taught a thing.
The badger job never really ended
Dachshunds were bred to go down a hole in the ground, alone, in the dark, and confront something with claws. The tunnel was the office. Tight walls meant safety, not panic.
That instinct did not get bred out when the breed moved indoors. It just got repointed at your duvet.
A dachshund under a blanket is not hiding from you. She is at work, in a den of her own design, and she would like you to keep your voice down.
Give them a better tunnel
Buy or make a proper burrow bed, the kind with a sewn-in flap, and put it where the family actually is. A den in a spare room is a den nobody uses.
Old fleece blankets work just as well. Fold one in half, tuck the fold under a cushion, and let physics do the rest.
One safety note that matters: heavy bedding plus a determined tunneler can go wrong in hot weather. Lightweight fabric, breathable, and never anything with loose threads or drawstrings.
2. Walks Where the Nose Gets to Drive
Consider what you are actually attached to on the other end of that leash. Dogs carry somewhere around 200 to 300 million olfactory receptors. Humans manage about six million.
Scent hounds sit at the high end of that range. Your dachshund is essentially a nose with a warranty and four short legs.
The sniff is the walk
Marching briskly around the block while your dog strains sideways at a fence post is exercise for you. It’s a commute for them.
A twenty minute walk where the dog is allowed to stop, snort, circle, and read the same patch of grass three times does more for their mood than an hour of forced trotting. Sniffing lowers heart rate. It genuinely tires them out. It is, in the most literal sense, how they check their messages.
Ten minutes of sniffing beats thirty minutes of marching, every single time.
Make it obvious when they can choose
Try two modes. Loose leash and a release word for sniffing time, then a heel or a "let’s go" for the stretches where you need to cover ground.
Dogs pick this up fast. What frustrates them is inconsistency: allowed to sniff on Tuesday, dragged past the same bush on Wednesday.
3. A Job. Any Job. Preferably a Ridiculous One
Terriers get all the credit for being busy little maniacs, but dachshunds are hounds with a working brain and a low boredom threshold, which is a combination that will find its own entertainment if you don’t supply some.
Unsupervised entertainment usually means your baseboards.
Cheap jobs that actually satisfy them
Scatter their kibble across a towel, roll it up loosely, and let them unpack breakfast. That’s a five minute setup that buys you fifteen minutes of contented snuffling.
Snuffle mats do the same thing with less laundry.
Hide three treats in three rooms while they wait, then release them with a word. Watching a dachshund methodically clear a house is genuinely funny, and it drains them in a way a walk never quite does.
Cardboard boxes stuffed with crumpled paper and a few kibbles are free, disposable, and endlessly renewable.
Why the tired dog is the happy dog
Mental work fatigues dogs faster than physical work, which is useful information when you own a breed with a bad back and a strong opinion about stairs.
Ten minutes of nose games can settle a dachshund who has been pacing and whining for an hour. Try it before you assume the problem is separation anxiety.
4. Physical Contact, Constantly, To an Absurd Degree
The following is not affection so much as it is policy: your dachshund would like to be touching you at all times, and if that is not possible, she will settle for being touched by something you were recently touching.
Behind your knees. Under the desk, on your feet. Wedged in the gap between your hip and the arm of the sofa.
Velcro dogs by design
Pack hunting breeds were selected to stay close and stay tuned in. That closeness didn’t come with an off switch for evenings and weekends.
Add a small body that loses heat quickly, and you get an animal with both an emotional and a thermodynamic argument for sitting on you.
The warm dent your dachshund leaves in the sofa cushion is a love letter, and she will absolutely be checking whether you sat in it.
Where it tips into a problem
Closeness is lovely right up until the dog cannot cope with a closed bathroom door.
Build in small, boring separations from day one. Step outside for two minutes. Sit in another room with a coffee. Come back with no fuss, no greeting ceremony, no apology.
The goal is a dog who loves your company and can also survive an afternoon without it.
5. Dull, Predictable, Beautifully Boring Routine
Dogs do not read clocks; they read patterns. Dachshunds seem to read them with unusual precision, which is why yours starts hovering by the food bowl fifteen minutes before dinner and stares at you with quiet menace.
That anticipation is not impatience. It’s comfort.
Predictability lowers the volume on everything
Meals at roughly the same time. Walks in roughly the same slots. A wind down cue in the evening, even something as small as turning off the kitchen light before you settle on the couch.
Dogs living on a consistent rhythm bark less, settle faster, and recover more quickly when something genuinely does go sideways: a vet trip, a house guest, a thunderstorm.
Anxiety in dachshunds often looks like stubbornness. A lot of the time it’s just a dog who has no idea what happens next.
Build in the small chaos too
Total rigidity has its own cost. A dog who has never experienced a late dinner will find the first one deeply upsetting.
So keep the structure and vary the details. Different walk routes. Occasional meals half an hour off schedule. A weekend where the whole day slides sideways.
Steady bones, flexible edges. That combination produces a dachshund who is confident rather than merely comfortable, and it costs you nothing but a bit of attention to how the day is shaped.