How Dogs Make Sense of Time
How Our Dogs Make Sense of Time…
If you’ve had the privilege of living with a dog for any length of time, then you may have noticed an uncanny ability to know when the important events of the day are about to happen. Maybe those big eyes begin to stare a little harder, or their feet do a happy little dance—and sure enough, it’s time for morning walks.
Later in the day, you hear that familiar whine or grumble, or if your dog’s a bit more obvious, a food bowl might drop at your feet right around - yep - 5 p.m! But as far as we know, dogs still can’t read analog or digital clocks. So what gives? Can your dog really know that dinner comes at 5:15 every day?
So how do these smart, funny, deeply attuned creatures seem to know what time it is—or at least how time passes?
The Science Is Sniffing Its Way There
The truth is, the exact mechanisms dogs use to track time aren’t fully understood, and research in this area is still limited. But that doesn’t mean we’re totally in the dark. There are some fascinating theories rooted in both animal behavior and neuroscience.
Let’s start with learning and memory. Pavlov’s classic experiments showed us that dogs (and other animals) form implicit memories - the type of unconscious memory that allows them to perform learned behaviors, like touching their nose to a bell on cue or recognizing feeding routines. But whether dogs also have episodic memory - the ability to recall past events with context and detail - is still up for debate.
Circadian Rhythms and Routine
Like most mammals, dogs have a circadian rhythm - an internal 24-hour clock that helps regulate sleep awake cycles and other physiological processes. While their actual sleep cycles differ from ours, dogs have evolved to sync fairly closely with human schedules. They will however - nap in shorter intervals - often moving around more frequently during the day, when we are away, or up and doing things. An important factor to keep in mind when expecting a dog to sleep for 4-6 hours alone during the day.
Over time, a consistent and predictable daily routine can serve as a kind of internal clock for them, helping signal when it's time to play, eat, nap, or patrol the front window.
Environmental Cues: More Than Meets the Eye
In my work as a behavior consultant specializing in separation anxiety, I’ve noticed dogs often rely heavily on environmental cues to track time. That might include:
The sound of a neighbor’s dog passing by every day around 3pm
The daily morning mail delivery
Shifting sunlight through a window
Internal cues like hunger or a full bladder
Dogs learn to associate external events with what tends to happen next. It's a kind of canine calendar built on pattern recognition.
Time… Smells?
Here’s where things get really interesting—and a little mind-blowing. Dogs experience the world primarily through scent. Their sense of smell is estimated to be up to 100,000 times stronger than ours. Where we might see the day unfolding with visual imagery, dogs smell their way through time.
Smells change over time. Odors dissipate, shift, and move with airflow providing information about not just what happened, but when. Helping dogs not only understand the past but also peek into the future through scent. While sniffing a bush to learn about who was there 15 minutes ago a breeze may let your dog know a friend (or foe) is also headed their way!
Another example, your scent starts to fade the moment you leave home. Some researchers believe dogs may use the rate of scent dissipation as a kind of clock, helping them estimate how long you’ve been gone and when you’re likely to return (based on previous patterns).
The NPR story about Donut the dog explores this beautifully. Who hasn't heard the tale of Hachiko a Japanese Akita who greeted his human daily at the train station and repeated this behavior for nearly 10 years after his guardian passed. While no formal studies have proven this scent-based time-tracking ability, there’s strong anecdotal evidence that dogs can, in effect, “smell time.” After all, search and rescue dogs have, in theory, been using this method to find their charges for years and years!
What We Know (And What’s Still a Mystery)
While there’s a lot we don’t yet know about how dogs perceive time, we do know they use a combination of internal rhythms, environmental patterns, and their powerhouse sense of smell to make sense of their world. And yes, that includes when dinner’s due.
While working with dogs working to overcome separation anxiety I frequently observe dogs that are overly sensitized to environmental cues - they’ve become extremely sensitive to movement towards a door, sounds of keys or car doors, and most likely the smells we cannot observe, of their humans that predict something aversive and scary. My job then - through gradual desensitization training - is to change those associations and guide the dog to create new safe predictive associations and memories in time. This allows the dog to learn new skills to regulate their circadian rhythm and feel relaxed and neutral to the various cues that signal time alone as well as predictors that humans may return soon. We are rewiring dogs neural pathways to allow new information to flow into the nervous system.
Even without smartwatches or alarms, dogs are incredible observers and adapters. They use the tools available to them—scent, sound, light, routine, and memory—to anticipate what’s next. As with so much in canine behavior science, the more we learn, the more we’re amazed by what dogs can do—and just how tuned in they really are.
Have You Noticed Your Dog’s Internal Clock?
What cues do you think your dog uses to keep track of the day? Is it the smell of the neighbor’s grill? The sound of your keys? Their stomach grumbling at the same time every evening?
I’d love to hear your observations—drop a comment below or share with me on Instagram!
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