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Your dog probably knows when you are about to get home from work
If you’ve ever set up a camera to see what your dog is doing while you’re out of the house, you may have seen them sitting by the door or staring out of a window waiting for you to get back.
It’s a sad thought, but your dog isn’t aimlessly waiting thinking they’ve been abandoned forever. Research suggests your furry friend knows how long you’ve been gone, and when you’re about to get home.
Your dog probably knows when you’re coming home
In a video with Antelope Pets on TikTok, a vet explained that dogs associate things with cues. For example, when they your car door slam outside of the house, they know you are about to walk through the door.
Other environmental cues that show you’re about to get home from work could include sunlight through the window, a certain show on the radio, a clock chiming or feeling hungry as it’s almost dinner time.
Dogs are very clever and begin to associate these cues with the action that follows. So, if you always get home at 7pm when it’s just starting to get dark outside, your pooch will know that and likely be waiting for you.
Another theory says dogs can smell time
However, dogs might actually know that it’s almost time for you to get home in another way too – through smell. This stems from the idea that dogs can smell time through the human scent that is around the home.
Dogs have more than 200 million smell receptors,�the American Kennel Club explains, which is a staggering 40 times what humans have, so smell is their most important sense.
“Dogs are living in basically an olfactory world, and I think they are able to track time with smells,” psychologist Alexandra Horowitz, who studies dog cognition at Columbia University and Barnard College, told NPR.
“Humans stink, even the very clean among us,” she continued. “Dogs can recognize their owners by their smell alone.”
This scent is present at a higher degree when the owner first leaves and it gradually fades throughout the day. Dogs could then associate a certain concentration of scent with the time their owner gets home for the day.
We are always leaving our scent everywhere, from skin cells to perfume. So, it’s a very probable theory that dogs associate this loss of scent as a cue that you are about to come home.
Dogs tell time through their body clock
Dogs don’t tell time in the same way we do. They don’t know that 8am means breakfast and 10pm is bed time, but they do perceive time in a similar way through their own biological clock.
Like humans, they have a circadian rhythm, which are the physical, mental, and behavioral changes an organism experiences over a 24-hour cycle.
They tell the time through changes in their body and environment during the day, PetMD explains. This includes responding to light and dark, hormone levels, tiredness and scent.
So, dogs can experience time passing, but they do not know exactly how long you have been gone in hours, seconds and minutes.
A study into pets’ behavior after being left alone found that dogs do express more happiness towards their owner after being left for longer periods of time.
12 privately owned dogs were video-recorded on three different occasions when left alone in their home environment and they all showed more tail wagging, lip licking, body shaking and physical contact with their owners upon reunion after a longer time of separation.
This implies that dogs are affected by time and able to perceive how long you have been gone for.
They are more clever than you think!
