Can dogs tell how long you're gone?
Jerod McCullough
2025-06-19 18:18:53
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: 11
Dogs have no sense of time is something I’ve heard and read over and over and over again, and always wondered why anyone thought they knew it to be true. I’ve been asked this question often, and always answered I simply didn’t know, but that it seemed reasonable that they had some sense of time, even if it wasn’t exactly like ours. In brief, 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. There are many ways to interpret that, but 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. 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.
Irma Hermann
2025-06-12 04:14:17
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: 8
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. 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. Dogs are capable of being trained based on past events, and can be taught to anticipate future events based on past experiences. 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.
Bud McDermott
2025-05-30 13:50:27
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: 5
Dogs perceive time through changes in their body, observation, and smell. They can’t tell how many hours, days, or weeks you have been absent. But they can sense the passage of time through many mechanisms while you are gone. Because dogs tend to focus on the current moment, it could be a case of you either being there or not. Some dogs seem just as excited to see us after a short departure as with a longer departure. However, when studied, more greeting behaviors were observed upon the owner’s return from an absence greater than two hours. Dogs have a higher metabolism than humans, and thus experience time more slowly. Our 60 minutes translates to about 75 minutes for them. They can use the level of your scent to predict your return home. For example, 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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