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Pets and the concept of time
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Last weekend, the dog days of summer officially ended with the end of Daylight Savings Time. The concept of Daylight Savings Time, while considered outdated by some, is a wonderful thing for those of us who walk our dogs at night. The late afternoon/early evening light provides us an opportunity to get our dogs out there for one last long walk while it's still light enough to determine if they are sniffing the grass or actually consuming an unknown bug or object off the grass.
When the time changed this weekend, I realized that we'd be walking earlier in the day, and probably taking shorter walks at night in the dark. What didn't occur to me, however, was that my dog would still be on Daylight Savings Time.
There's little scientific evidence of a dog's sense of time - clearly, their clock reading skills are limited - but we all know that our pets sense when it's time to eat, and when they can anticipate certain events marked by time like when you'll arrive home at the end of the day. There's definite evidence that dogs can sense time as far as a marker or an alert within their day. But there is not much documentation of how a dog or a cat adjust to different time zones, or a change within the same time zone, such as from Daylight Savings to Standard time.
I can only speak for my pets and not from a greater study, but I can tell you that my dog is up at her normal time in the morning - which used to be 7:30am, and now since the time changed, is 6:30am - and my cat is ready to be fed (and therefore wakes me up by pouncing on me) at the same time. Despite feeding the cat an hour later at night, and taking the dog outside an hour later before bed, they still wake up at the time they've become accustomed to, regardless of the fact that it no longer corresponds with an acceptable wake up time for me.
I'm sure others have found this same thing to be true, and have found that our pets have the same time adjustments to make as humans.
