One of the great joys of my life as a writer is violating Betteridge’s Law.
Betteridge’s Law is an old adage among reporters that “any headline phrased as a question can be answered with a ‘no.”
So spoiler alert for this piece: yes. Dogs do have a sense of time.
And for those of you who clicked on this piece because of the Proust reference — well, there’s no accounting for taste.
But I digress.
The backstory of this piece is a conversation I had about whether or not dogs can experience jealousy — and no, they can’t. Not like we can. And that ties into how each of us perceive time.
You see, humans, we experience jealousy because of how we can perceive time.
Jealousy, simply, is an anxiety over a perceived scarcity of a given resource — usually a social resource (a friend, a partner, something we own, etc).
We’re a tribal creature. Dogs aren’t.
As tribal creatures, we view social connections as an invaluable resource.
Tribal creatures survive by forming social groups as a means to survive, in which group membership is of greater importance than the contribution of the individual to the group.
That’s a whole deep-dive in and of itself — but Aristotle described humans as “political creatures.” We value hierarchies and hegemonies in our societies in ways other mammals don’t. We structure our survival around the formation of tribes — political entities, that run on strictly-defined hierarchy, class, etc.
For much of our history in observing dog (and their ancestors’) behavior — we’ve impressed that structure onto them. Famously being debunked by the very researcher who gave us the “alpha hypothesis” — that dogs (well, canids) have very strictly, rigidly-defined hierarchies much like we do: just that theirs is based on power and dominance.
That’s not the case.
Dogs in the wild (and our friendly, neighborhood couch potatoes, coworkers, and best buds) — very rarely have conflicts, almost never exhibit dominance-like behaviors, and have very intricate, communal societies.
The notable exception came from the study that gave us the alpha hypothesis — studying wolves in captivity. Wolves will compete with each other for resources and establish power-based dominance — to ensure their own survival, especially when they perceive a current resource scarcity (this is important in a second).
When they have packs that function, and don’t have to worry about current scarcities — well, they’re basically little communists. Their societies aren’t directly comparable to human societies and human politics, but their groupings are fairly accurately described in the Marxist adage — “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
In the wild, wolves move in and out of their local packs, going where their particular skills are needed, or where there are more resources (and so they don’t tax a struggling pack’s resources), and tend to share members back and forth, where there are more packs in an area.
Each pack is led by a breeding pair, and organized into something like what we would call a “clan.” In which there is a patriarch and matriarch — and they tend to be mostly deferred to, but each member has a role and job and way they provide — and value to the clan.
How this is important to understand how we both perceive time, is in understanding we have different social needs that our brains developed around.
Humans, by virtue of being tribal — have to be concerned with the perception of future scarcity — to know whether or not we need to war with another tribe over resources.
Dogs’ social structure is more defined by current scarcity (see — told you that’d be important). So long as their “clan,” is provided for — everyone is eating, everyone is happy, everyone is provided for and contribuing — they have no worry for scarcity. They need to be able to get along more with each other, most of the time (because they don’t have the luxury we do of perceiving members of other packs as enemies-by-default — they’re potential contributors to the pack’s welfare, by default, so long as they’re not approaching with aggression).
Because of that — they see time differently than we do.
As “advanced,” as humans are — we still really don’t have a great grasp on what time even is, let alone how we perceive it. There are varying theories of varying complexity.
For purposes of this — assume the Ancient Greeks were right (current understanding of time is basically this — just exponentially more complex).
Ancient Greek thinkers divided time into two levels:
Chronos: The actual passage of time. Chronological time(where we get the term from): the time that passes, for example, on a clock or a calendar. A more objective measure of time. Time passes regardless — and that’s chronological time.
Kairos: Subjective time.The way our minds (via our cognition) perceive time. How time is perceived on a subjective level. How time feels as though it “speeds up,” as we age — that’s kairos. Subjective time.
It’s only been fairly recently we’ve even bothered considering that other creatures perceive time differently. This is partially due to anthropocentrism — the idea that humans are, by default, superior to other creatures. That we’re, somehow special and unique — and ties into the religious ideas of being the world’s “custodians,” and having dominion over the earth and everything on it — making everything not-human an “object,” or an “other.”
That itself has its roots (in the sciences) in that academia as we know it — was set up by the capital-C Church in the west — and that’s an entirely separate deep-dive too.
Now that we’ve begun getting out of that — we’ve taken more time to examine how other animals work, in relation to us.
The pair collected a wealth of prior studies and attempted to look at how various creatures (us included) learn, remember — and perceive time.
As it happens, various kinds of vertebrates — and invertebrates — have ways of estimating and comparing time intervals and durations, similarly to how we do. And likely tied into a way to distinguish current and non-current survival needs — like a food scarcity, or experience of hunger. Being able to distinguish between “I feel hungry,” and “I feel hungry now,” is important for survival.
Some evidence for this is that metabolic rate (how quickly we digest, draw energy, and burn energy from what we eat) plays a heavy role in animals’ ability to perceive time.
Animals with a small size (a lot of invertebrates, like ants or flies) have a fast metabolic rate — and perceive time slower. The reverse is true for slower metabolic rates — we perceive time passing faster (and a reason why time seems to pass more quickly as we age — our metabolism slows).
There’s varying hypothesis for why this is — but a likely one is that smaller, more agile creatures survive better by perceiving time more slowly (as though the rest of the world is moving in comparative slow motion).
Dogs are an interesting case — and we’ve studied them and tried to understand how they perceive time.
The idea that your dog has no idea when you’ll be home — that’s a myth.
They’re able to distinguish durations ranging from minutes up to several hours in different ways. Dog reacted in one study (liked just above) with increasing intensity to their people coming home, when left alone for longer periods — regardless of how the humans greeted them.
They seem to have a slower sense of time when they’re hungry.
If that feels a little weird for you to wrap your head around — think about this.
Remember being a kid? Sitting in class, waiting for lunchtime? How time seemed to utterly drag?
Same concept. Your sense of time slowed with anticipation of food.
Or when you wait for your crush to call you back, or you’re worried about your kids making it home safe — and time seems to drag. Same concept. It’s the anticipation tied into autonomic function (things like hunger, fear, variance in heat and cold, etc.) that affects your perception of time.
Dogs work the same way — and in the same ways.
Their sense of time is tied into somatic experience — things they feel in their body, filtered through their brain and cognition (basically the GUI of the brain).
Their subjective experience of time (kairos, remember?) is through changes in their body (like hunger, or sensing the world getting darker outside the window), and sensory inputs (as above — changes in light — or things like familiar smells or noises they hear at specific times).
While they can’t “tell time,” like us in a measured, chronological sense exactly like we do — that also has its own, long history, of how we tell time, and why we do as we do, and largely for socially-based reasons — they can still tell a kind of chronological time, as measured by a dog.
Dogs being communal creatures — remember, having a need to contribute and share provision of resources within a group — seem to anchor (what it sounds like: a reference point for time or memory) their sense of time around their core circadian rhythm (when they wake up and when it’s time for bed) and whenever mealtime is (they have their priorities straight, yeah?).
There’s also a misconception that dogs don’t have episodic memories.
In real-people terms (not big-nerd-time terms): episodic memory is the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life.
For much of our thousands-of-years relationship with our best buds — we’ve thought they can’t experience memory like we can.
Turns out, they likely can — due to similarities in their neurobiology (how they’re brains’ are built) and neurocircuitry (how their brains and the rest of their nervous systems are “wired together”).
And they, like we can — use emotionally-based experiences as anchor points for their senses of time and memory (knowing when their person is supposed to be home, for example).
This is also crucial to behavioral recall — how dogs know how to behave when given commands, for example — and why positive reinforcement works so well. They can anchor the happy experience of getting a treat or pets when they perform well, and tie that to a memory of specific behavior.
The brilliant Alexandra Horowitz, in her book, Being a Dog, also goes into how dogs’ noses are so sensitive — it’s likely also a way for them to, “tell time.”
For example, when you are home, your scent is strongest. After you leave and over the course of your day, your scent begins to weaken. At a certain point, you arrive home. Your dog can use the level of your scent to predict your return home.
Horowitz also points out that the movement of a scent can inform a dog about the past and the future.
A scent that is weak and low to the ground can signify a dog that has passed by. A scent wafting in the air and getting increasingly stronger may tell a dog that someone may arrive soon.
Maybe not like you can — not in terms of how we measure time: in hours, days, or weeks.
But they do have the ability to sense the passing of time through a variety of means. They tend to (unlike us) focus on the current moment (rather than the past and future, like we do), and can tell that we’re not there with them.
Training dogs struggling with separation anxiety is largely about teaching them that, no — we’re not going to be gone forever. A dog with separation anxiety just doesn’t know for sure that we’re coming back. But when they learn that we are, those greeting behaviors measured in the amount of time they feel passes — kick in.
Your dog may seem just as excited to see you after an hour as a week without you. But when it’s been studied — they do have different ways to tell us how much they’ve missed us. At least when (in that study) we’ve been gone more than two hours.
What’s an Hour for a Dog?
Because it’s such a relatively young thing to be studied for dogs — there’s some debate about what their perception of an hour would be, compared to ours.
Because they perceive time differently than we do (and at different speeds), their perception is tied to their metabolism. Their metabolism is faster than ours — and remember — faster metabolism means a slower perception of time.
So roughly, comparing metabolisms, their sense of “an hour,” would be about 75 minutes, for our 60 minutes.
So are they able to learn to live with the differences in how we see time? Absolutely.
Even with the differences, they also have a natural awareness of time. We do too — but ours was “dumbed down,” a little bit by our reliance on clocks, calendars, and timers — things dogs don’t have.
But because they, as communal creatures, become in tune with their family’s schedules and routines, we align our senses of time the best we can.
Most dogs don’t like to sleep until their humans are settled, prefer eating when their humans eat, and waking when we do.
Dogs rely on routines and schedules just like we do. And without those things — they can become anxious or depressed.
If your buddy seems to be a little more high strung, or a little more lethargic when you drastically change routines, that’s why. And part of managing anxiety in dogs is giving them structure and routines and ways to feel they contribute (what working dog owners tend to call “jobs”).
Time is On Our Side
So while, no, your dog isn’t going to be eyeing the clock while waiting on you to get home — they still can tell time, in their way.
So — hurry home. They miss you when you’re gone. Even if they listen to the ticking of their grumpy stomach rather than a clock.
My two dogs ARE jealous of each other and they flat know TIME!!
Merry Prankster
15d ago
Yep, I have a 2 yr old black lab and she is definitely routine oriented. Food, walk, play ball, wrestling time, snack time, and bedtime. So, basically I work around her schedule.🤣🤣😍
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