Well, somehow my cat knows exactly when it’s 5 am. She comes and meows at my bedroom door every morning at 5 am on the dot - I’ve checked the clock. And with the days growing shorter now, and the sunrise later, you’d think if she was going by the light outside she’d be late - but she never is. Explain that one.
My dog, Snoopy, always let us know when it was time to feed her dinner. At exactly 5 PM, regardless of what activity she was engaged in or what was going on in the house, she would go stand next to the cabinet where her food was kept. If that didn’t work within 5 minutes, she would start pacing between her bowl and the cabinet.
I can think of numerous example of animals being able to tell time quite accurately. The most impressive one I’ve witnessed was when my brother and I were making the 17-mile drive at Pebble Beach. We got out of the car at a scenic spot, and as we stood there, gulls and birds of many kinds started flying in, landing, and puttering around. In the space of a couple of minutes we were surrounded by a large crowd of birds. Then a scheduled tour bus pulled up. Despite the many “Do not feed the birds” signs, the birds were well fed. When the bus left, the birds flew away. There’s no doubt in my mind that those birds know the bus schedules to the minute.
My two dogs, a 12-year old beagle and an 8-month old border collie/lab, are children. Whenever I yell at the bd/l, the beagle comes up afterwards and sucks up. “I’m the good dog, right daddy? I’m the good dog!”
There’s probably some validity to the article, in that the bc/l is an escape artist and has dug out from underneath my fence numerous times. Each time I’ve located the hole and patched it up, but she finds a different spot. I kept getting so many calls from neighbors saying she was in their yard, I finally put her on a runnning leash for a week. She hasn’t dug her way out since. She finally got the idea that she’s SUPPOSED to stay in the yard.
Now I just gotta find a way to keep her from eating my books, shoes, garbage, etc.
I disagree. you can train a cat or dog (I’ve done both) to stop doing something by just yelling, and never raising a violent hand to them. you really don’t even have to yell at most cats; they just don’t like sudden loud noises-- you can substitute an aluminum can full of marbles shaken very hard, actually. alternatively, you can chase them instead of hitting them. if you accompany this with a loud angry voice, they will almost always run, and eventually you can just yell without chasing to get the desired effect.
I doubt they understand the actual words, but I think they understand certain sounds or combinations of them. I’ve experimented with this a little… for example, if you call a dog whose name ends “y” some other name that ends in “y”, many times they will come anyway. if you give a command like “high five” with something that has the same vowel sounds and intonation but is really nonsense, they’ll still high five. some people do stuff like this using treats and can eventually teach the animal to distinguish between very similar sounds, too, so that they won’t respond to a fake command. cats I don’t know about; seems to me they’re just less inclined to learn commands in general.
Regarding the author’s statement about dogs not being aware of time, I wonder if he is trying to say that dogs are not aware of time passing, i.e. understanding how long it has been since the owner left the house. While I think dogs definitely have an awareness of time in the sense of being able to establish a routine, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought only in terms of the present. If this is true, the author’s argument that a dog is not capable of getting angry at the owner once it had been left alone for a certain amount of time would still hold. It could know that the time of day when the owner normally played ball had arrived, and get anxious at the variation in the routine, but not know that the owner had left four hours ago and wouldn’t be back for four more hours.
I really think that’s what he’s trying to say. It’s not like the animal is saying “OK it’s been 2 hours now that I’ve been left alone. This is Bullshit! I’m crapping the rug!” It’s the “there” - “not there” issue, and how each animal can tolerate the uncertainty and stress of being without the owner’s attention, direction and control, not so much the interval.
Beyond this for the posters indicating how precise their animals internal alarm clocks are, this is also not quite the point. It’s not that animals can’t learn to gauge and anticipate time intervals, it’s whether or not they attach shades of emotional meaning and intent (ie anger, revenge etc) to specific intervals of being left alone.
Exactly. The anxiety builds with time, but the dog is not consciously choosing its actions based on how much time is passed. Thus the fact a dog may be fine for two hours but chew up the couch after four hours is simply a symptom of how stressed he got after four unsupervised hours, not an editorial on how often he wants to see you. Which I think was the author’s point.
I would. I just think it’s an extraordinary claim to say that animals experience time completely differently from humans. If animals and humans both need to judge the passage of time, then I’d first assume that they probably sense time the same way until proven differently. Ocham’s razor does *not * say animals probably don’t have human-like thoughts, sensations or emotions until proven otherwise. On the contrary - it makes more sense to say that if an animal does something that a human also does (like keep a routine), it’s brain probably uses a similar neural mechanism to accomplish that task. And if so, they probably have a similar experience of the associated phenomena. Otherwise you’re essentially claiming that evolution coincidentally came up with two mechanims for the same function in otherwise closely related species (who both have large brains).
In general I’m arguing against the premise that the extraordinary claim is that animals function in ways similar to humans. I think the extraordinary claim is that animals are completely different. Or conversely that humans do things in a way completely different from animals.
Actually, I would think it is more likely that the birds associate the bus and the scenic spot with food. They can probably see the bus coming from some distance while in the air, and fly to the “food” spot before it gets there, thus seeming to be showing up at a scheduled time for us ground-bound humans. Other gulls see the first few making purposeful movements rather than random search movement and follow them. Most birds are pretty hardwired, and I doubt that they have any significant time sense.
I do have a theory that this arrogance is a big part of why we domesticated cats in the first place. You spend all day building pyramids for Pharoh, and that uppity bastard is still all snooty and superior to you, and all you can do is genuflect and keep your mouth shut. Then you go home, when your cat gives you that same snooty, superior attitude, you can give him a good kicking. Or at least put sticky tape on his paws so he walks around funny.
Actually, it seems to me that there’s a good chance that cats and, especially, dogs have picked up quite a bit of human psychology. We’ve been selectively breeding these animals for millenia, and one of the traits most commonly bred for is compatability with humans. And a dog that thinks like a human is going to be more compatable than a dog that doesn’t.
Of course, this is going to vary incredibly from dog to dog, and from breed to breed. Considering the physical differences between a chihuahua and New Foundland, it’s no stretch to recognize that there are going to be equally huge mental differences. My dog, for example, is smart enough to practice deceit. When I take him to one of those pet stores that allow you to bring your pet in with you, he tries to shoplift. He goes up to a bin when he thinks I’m not looking, takes a bone completely into his mouth (he’s a big dog, with a correspondingly big mouth) and then spends the rest of the time in the store studiously looking away from me, so I can see that he’s got something in his mouth. He also decides he wants to leave right now! Thankfully, he’s not very good at deceit, so I always tell the cashier to ring up the bone. I like to let him think he’s getting away with it. I figure, if I start catching him at it, he’s just going to learn how to get better at stealing stuff.
On the other hand, a friend of my mom’s had a poodle that is so stupid, it barely qualifies as mammalian. Once, when we were dogsitting it, we had to piles of boxes stacked up against the wall, with just enough space between them to fit the poodle. The idiot dog would walk into the gap, get to the wall, and then just stand there whining until someone rescued it, because it was too stupid to back up. And, of course, once you got it out, it would be only five-ten minutes before it got stuck in there again. Dumb, dumb, dumb dog.
My parrot, Alvin, says, “I’m Alvin.” Call me crazy, but I think he might be self aware.
I’ve always wondered if some of the difference between people and animals is that we’ve become incredibly complex and our awareness of understanding subtle signals has been lost to some extent. We call it intuition or even psychic, instead of being good at remembering small details and putting them together sub-conciously. With animals their use of their senses and training is more obvious because it’s so much simpler. Or I’m completely wrong and it’s painfully obvious I majored in art, not animal behavior stuff.
One thing about animals like cats and dogs not being big thinkers that has me puzzled. A while back, one evening one of my cats got out and I couldn’t do much of a search till the next afternoon. I started walking around the complex calling for her, but there was only my neighbor’s cat Expresso sitting on the walk. He’s really super friendly so I kept going toward him to give him a pet. I was about six feet from him when he moved away toward the building, which was odd because he’s a slut for petting.
He also started meowing, very strange for him. Looking over his shoulder he saw me just standing on the walk looking around for my Violet and wondering what the hell was wrong with Expresso. This time he walked right over to me, meowed up a storm, and dashed over to a big bush by the wall. He dashed back to me, nudged me, meowed and ran back to the bush. I went over to the bush to see what had him so agitated-- a juicy mouse? a new rule for petting?
Nope, it was Violet, so scared she didn’t even register my approach much less respond to my calls. If it weren’t for Expresso I’d never had seen her, the bush was dense and she blended in almost perfectly. I picked her up, Expresso walked in a little circle and then sauntered off, his usual mellow self.
I doubt he’s seen Violet in my windowsill more than a couple of times. At the very least he determined she was mine because he sits in the same window downstairs. He figured out he didn’t see that cat outside, that she was unhappy, and that I was looking for her, perhaps. Lastly, he came up with actions that would draw my attention.
It might not be thought on a par with humans, but that’s one heck of a response to repetative actions, environment and stimulus, and crude instinct. In my book, Expresso is a hero either way.
My dog shows evidence of awareness of time passing. A caveat: This is a Standard Poodle, one well loved, and well talked to and conversed with. This is one of the smartest breeds of dog, and this dog is smart for the breed.
He is a mommy’s dog. He is hers first, and ours second. She is the most important person in his life.
We have a driveway, which leads to the garage. The garage is under a large picture window. There is little else to see from the picture window, the trees and yard are all in other walls.
It has been observed that, when my mother goes away overnight, he will grow anxious at certain points. Roughly, ‘In about three hours.’ ‘the time she should be home to cook dinner’, ‘the time she should be home, come heck or high water’, and ‘about two hours before bed time.’ These aren’t scheduled times, exactly, simply points in the day she should be home at, judging from her schedule.
Er. Anxious means, in this case, he’ll run to the window over the driveway, look out, and whine or paw for a bit. Possibly grab one of us by the hand and lead us there.
A) The pyramid builders were actually well-paid professionals and craftsmen, not slaves or lowly laborers.
B) Anyone who suggests a valid form of stress-relief is kicking or torturing a live animal is a psychopath who should not be allowed to breathe.
Irene Pepperberg makes a strong case that African Greys have cognitive abilities in The Alex Studies. A facinating book, although sometimes slow.
My cat is extremely offended by this thread, but simply cannot be bothered enough to interrupt his current Tolstoy literary work for such foolishness.
Cats don’t think like humans…Humpf!
This made my day.
They don’t think like humans in any way at all?