About half a mile from my house, a red knit scarf has been wrapped around a telephone pole for almost two years. Don’t ask me why it’s there, but almost every day I pay it a visit with my dog, Bowie. Fortunately for him, the scarf, faded to a sad shade of pink, has slipped far enough down the pole that he can now give it a proper sniff.

The mystery scarf is one of the many details about my neighborhood that Bowie has alerted me to since we got him in 2020. His addition to our family was the result of a relentless campaign by my very bored and socially isolated children. Like millions of Americans, I climbed on the pandemic puppy bandwagon, having been persuaded that a pooch would improve our home life, serving as a furry distraction from the tedium. Like most cleareyed mothers, I also assumed that after the newness wore off for the children, I’d be stuck doing most of the work.

However, as a first-time dog owner, I did not anticipate how thoroughly and enthusiastically a dog would demand that I see my neighborhood from a different perspective.

The scarf was just the beginning. I have also learned that my neighborhood is home to many, many more stray cats than I ever imagined. Ask Bowie — he announces their presence as loudly as he possibly can. I now know that the neighbor with the Pekingese takes his dog out several times a day, but never goes very far. The geese in the park near my house couldn’t care less about small dogs, regardless of how loudly they bark, and will gladly hijack the entire walking path if they’re in the mood. And when I spotted an injured fox limping into the park a few days ago, I knew that it was the same one that had been living in the park’s forested edge because I’d seen it so often with Bowie.

Before I got a dog, I wondered how having one might change our home. Would he chew up the sofa? Would his dog beds, toys and food bowls overtake our living area? Would he disrupt my workday? None of these worries materialized in any significant way. Instead, he’s simply changed who and what I see throughout my day. A few days ago, another neighbor appeared in my backyard because her dog, Solly, has as much energy as my dog, and so the two frequently play. She asked me when I moved to the neighborhood. I’ve been here for 10 years. She’s been here 20. But we had never met, or even seen each other, until she adopted Solly last summer.

“The dog becomes something people are interested in and can become a fulcrum for knowing your community in different ways,” said Melissa Cooper, who for years kept a blog about the walks she took with her dog, Strider, after she moved back to Manhattan from Dallas in 2008. Strider (known as Esau in the blog) died in 2018, but Ms. Cooper still goes on the same walks, seeking out his favorite spots, like where the raccoons like to hide in Central Park. “Now I’m trained,” she said.

In her blog, aptly called “Out Walking the Dog,” Ms. Cooper often photographed the wildlife that she and Strider spotted, or the sunsets, or the way the ice would freeze on the rocks in Central Park. “If you’re serious about looking at wildlife, walking a dog is not the way to do it,” she said. But, if you want a companion to point out other creatures and heighten your senses, a dog certainly helps. “He opened up worlds for me,” Ms. Cooper said. “He would see things before I would. I’d learn how to see, how to listen, how to hear.”

He was also, apparently, an excellent rat hunter, with a knack for efficiently dispatching the rodents hidden beneath the trash bags on the sidewalks of her Morningside Heights neighborhood. “It’s incredible,” she said. “He could have cleaned up the whole neighborhood.”

Tanvi Misra, a journalist who writes frequently about migration and urban policy, had lived in the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C. for two years by the time she adopted Ruth, a mutt, in 2020. Ruth, a rescue, had been living on a farm in Arkansas and was terrified of the bustling, loud streets of her new neighborhood. So Ms. Misra sought out the quiet alleys behind the rowhouses and schools.

Through the gritty alleys, Ms. Misra came to appreciate an area that often seemed too polished to feel like home. “I grew up in a neighborhood in Delhi, India, that had a lot of nooks and crannies,” she said. Discovering the alleys with Ruth “brought back a little of that.”

She also started meeting neighbors and striking up conversations, something that was also out of her comfort zone. “Small talk is not easy for me,” she said of a conversation style that she finds distinctly American. “But with Ruth, there was always an excuse to start talking to people.”

Last summer, Ms. Misra and her partner moved to New York, renting an apartment in Queens. Ruth, now thoroughly a city dog, no longer needs her quiet alleys. Now she loves sampling the scraps near the food trucks in the Sunnyside neighborhood. “She finds the waste on the ground and she loves what I call street food,” Ms. Misra said.

Kim Kavin, the author of “Little Boy Blue: A Puppy’s Rescue from Death Row and His Owner’s Journey for Truth,” has found that as her dogs change, so do her walks. Her younger dog, Ginger, who’s 10, has hip dysplasia and arthritis, so Ms. Kavin recently asked other dog owners for tips on where she could find some flat hiking trails near her home in a rural part of Morris County, N.J. They led her to places she never knew existed. Now these trails that were previously invisible to her are part of her daily life.

“I would not be out here if I didn’t have dogs,” she said to me, talking by phone on a cold January afternoon as she trudged through six inches of snow in a park. “I would never walk so far, I would never explore so much, I certainly would not be trying all different kinds of parks.”

And yet there she was, huffing through the snow as her dogs dragged her through it.