For years, I have written about walking.
I have done so from everyday experience, from intuition, and from the slow observation of the body and the world as we advance step by step. Along that journey—which has been not only physical but intellectual—I began to formulate an idea that I called HOMO-ITER some years ago: the walking man of the future.
In those posts, written around 2020 (HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART I; and HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART II), I proposed that the human being of tomorrow would not be the fastest, nor the most technological, nor the most sedentarily “efficient,” but rather the one who recovered walking as the axis of their biological, cognitive and ethical life. I didn’t know it clearly then, but that idea wasn’t just a metaphor: it was an evolutionary intuition.
Today, after a long process of observation, measurement, systematization and reflection, that intuition has taken shape as a conceptual and scientific model: HOMETOITER (1).
From the intuitive HOMO-ITER to the HOMETOITER Scientific Model
HOMETOITER is a concept that integrates three inseparable dimensions:
- HOMEO → balance, regulation, homeostasis
- ETO → conduct, repetition, vital stability, ethology
- ITER → walking, moving, traversing the world
The model proposes a very clear central hypothesis:
Walking is not an optional activity or a prescribed exercise, but a basal vital function that regulates the biological, behavioral, and cognitive balance of the human being.
This hypothesis does not emerge from a laboratory, but from something much closer and, paradoxically, much more forgotten: the observation of the dog.
Why the dog?
Because the dog does not walk to “exercise.”
The dog walks because that is how it lives.
A dog walks to:
- regulate its energy,
- read its surroundings,
- process information,
- stabilize its behavior,
- maintain its emotional balance,
- exist.
When a dog does not walk, it falls ill. Not only physically, but behaviorally: anxiety, aggression, compulsions, disorientation. Veterinary medicine and ethology know this well.
The inevitable question is:
Why do we believe that something different happens to human beings?
Here lies a central idea of the essay:
The dog is the evolutionary mirror of human walking.
Not because humans should “imitate” dogs, but because the dog has kept intact a relationship with movement that the human being has fragmented and medicalized.
Sedentarism as an evolutionary rupture
Modernity has reduced walking to three limited categories:
- Exercise
- A healthy habit
- A medical prescription
In none of these is walking understood as a vital function. Sedentarism, on the other hand, has been culturally normalized, even though it contradicts our deepest biology.
The HOMETOITER model posits that sedentarism is not just a lifestyle problem, but an evolutionary rupture, comparable to depriving a cursorial animal of movement.
From this perspective, many contemporary pathologies—both human and canine—can be read as symptoms of prolonged immobility, rather than individual failings.
Walking is not just moving: it is reading the world
One of the most important axes of the essay is understanding walking as a primitive form of cognition.
The dog does it through smell.
The human does it through gaze, balance, and bodily memory.
Walking is:
- interpreting the environment,
- building territory,
- ordering experience,
- thinking with the body.
Before writing, before measuring, before calculating, we walked. And by doing so, the world became legible.
HOMETOITER: An ethics of life
The model does not propose returning to the past or idealizing nomadism, but rather reintegrating walking as the regulatory axis of modern life (2). This has profound implications:
- in health,
- in education,
- in urban planning,
- in the human-animal relationship,
- in our very idea of progress.
Walking stops being an option and becomes, once again, a biological and ethical necessity.
The dog reminds us of what we are
Perhaps the greatest contribution of this essay is not theoretical, but existential:
The dog does not argue whether walking is good or bad.
It does not justify it.
It does not schedule it.
It simply goes out and walks.
And in doing so, it reminds us—with silent faithfulness—of the life that still pulses within us, waiting to be reclaimed.
Exhortation
HOMETOITER is not just a concept.
It is an invitation.
To walk with greater awareness.
To look at the dog not as a pet, but as an evolutionary companion.
To recognize that many of our “intuitions” were, in reality, profound truths waiting to be formulated.
Perhaps the future of the human being is not in walking faster,
but in learning to walk well again.
(1) Loya Lopategui, Carlos, HOMETOITER. El Perro como Espejo Evolutivo del Caminar Humano (The Dog as the Evolutionary Mirror of Human Walking), EMULISA, Mexico, 2025. Available on Amazon, Kindle Edition: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0GCC4FX2Z
(2) Loya Lopategui, Carlos, Walking: Future of Humanity, EMULISA, Mexico, 2025. Available on Amazon, Kindle Edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPYXKZ6J