![]() ![]() ![]() 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. 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. However, there was no statistical significance between the dogs behavior if left alone for 2 or 4 hours. (“The Effect of time left alone at home on dog welfare,” Vol 129, 2011) 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. So yeah for researchers Therese Rehn and Lindsay Keeling for doing a study, published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, that attempts to answer that question. How would we know? 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. How many times have you heard that “dogs have no sense of time”? I’ve heard it and read it over and over and over again, and always wondered why anyone thought they knew it to be true. ![]()
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