Can dogs tell how long you've been gone?
Amira Willms
2025-07-10 03:37:49
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They recorded the behavior of dogs left by their owners for 30 min, 2 hours and 4 hours, and found that if the dogs had been left alone for 2 or 4 hours they greeted their owners with more ‘intensity,’ and were more active and attentive, than when the duration of separation had only been 30 minutes. However, there was no statistical significance between the dogs behavior if left alone for 2 or 4 hours. For what it’s worth, my observations, which are just anecdotes, are that Willie’s greeting behavior varies tremendously based on how long we have been away. When we returned from New Zealand, after being gone for 3 weeks, he ran between Jim and I, whining endearingly, flipping in circles, licking our faces raw . . . a very, much more intense greeting than if one of us had been gone for a day or two. Do you observe that your dog greets you differently when you’ve been gone longer? One is that the dogs perceived a separation of 2-4 hours as not being particularly different, but very much different from a 30 minute separation.
Christelle Wisozk
2025-07-03 20:28:37
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Dogs have a sense of time but don’t understand the ‘concept’ of time. While your dog will remember you leaving the house, they most likely won’t understand how long you were away. Dogs are capable of being trained based on past events, and can be taught to anticipate future events based on past experiences. When dogs are left alone, sometimes they become stressed, indicating that they have an awareness of the passage of time. Dogs can sense the changes in the air, for example, hot air rises over the course of an afternoon, and dogs can sense this. Sense of time is connected to memory. Animal memory is thought to be much more simplistic than human memory, and dogs have episodic memories, which means they are only able to remember certain events in their life. Dogs can smell the passing of time.
Kenny Davis
2025-06-21 04:08:41
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Dogs perceive time through changes in their body, observation, and smell. Though they may not know “5 p.m.,” or “dinner,” they may know exactly what time it is by the feeling of their empty stomach. They can sense the passage of time through many mechanisms while you are gone. They can’t tell how many hours, days, or weeks you have been absent. But when studied, more greeting behaviors were observed upon the owner’s return from an absence greater than two hours. Our 60 minutes translates to about 75 minutes for them. Dogs have a higher metabolism than humans, and thus experience time more slowly. It’s plausible that a dog can track short amounts of time by the strength of an odor and use olfactory memory for long-term time tracking. For example, as described above, when you leave for work, dogs will continue to monitor your scent until it reaches a level connected to you coming home.
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