How do your pets like to spend their time?
WHAT does your pet like to do all day? Compared to humans, pets generally have easy lives. They don’t need to go to school as puppies and kittens, and they never need to work (apart from the obvious exception of working dogs such as guide dogs, assistance dogs, police dogs and customs dogs at ports). Most pets are creatures of leisure.
Pets are provided with food, water, warmth and shelter as a normal part of their living arrangements. Need a haircut?
Not a problem. A new toy? Of course. And if they have an accident or fall ill, they are taken to the vet for medical care. They never need to cover the bills:all necessary costs are taken care of by their owners.
I often look at my lovely cat, stretched out sleeping in front of the fire: she really does live an enviable life. She can do precisely what she wants, and she seems to love doing exactly that.
From time to time, researchers do observational studies to work out precisely how animals do like to spend their time. As well as simple observational studies, the use of collar-based activity trackers
(like smart watches for animals) has allowed us to gain more information. The results can be surprising.
Dogs may love going for walks, but it seems that they enjoy sleeping even more. Studies of domestic pets, as well as reviews of free-ranging dog populations (which are common in India, Asia and Africa) show a remarkably consistent pattern. Typically, dogs like to spend 50% of a day sleeping, an additional 30% just lying around, and only 20% being active. This shows the importance of ensuring that your dog has a comfy bed, as well as an enjoyable period of exercise every day.
Cats are even more enthusiastic sleepers. One recent study observed 82 cats at a cat show over an eight hour period. The cat show would have had plenty of stressful stimuli for the cats to worry about, from strange people wandering past, to the proximity of the sight, sound and smell of other cats, to the novelty of a new environment. Despite this, 93.9% of the time, the cats were sleeping peacefully, entirely unfazed by any sense of stress.
It’s true that most pets are social creatures, and much as they like sleeping, they also enjoy company. Our Maine
Coon cat likes to sleep on our bed at night: sometimes she even goes so far as to crawl under the duvet, lying on her side and resting her head on the pillow, right beside me. I’m sure she could find a physically more comfortable spot, but she clearly enjoys the physical proximity to “her” humans.
Meanwhile, our Labrador cross Finzi enjoys snoozing for most of the daytime. But if a human is nearby, she likes to have her paw held in a human hand. If you are sitting close to her, she will position herself so that she can reach out with her paw to tap your hand. She makes it clear that she wants you to hold her paw; if you don’t do this, she will repeatedly tap your hand with her paw until you do. And once she has manipulated you into holding her paw, she will keep you like that for a long, long time. If you want to be left in peace, you need to get up and go somewhere else.
While Finzi is friendly (any human hand is welcome to hold her paw; you don’t need to be family), not all dogs are so friendly. Some dogs are very wary of strangers, preferring to stay close at all times to their tried and trusted closest family.
Some researchers, in a study reported recently in the New Scientist magazine, found that many dogs are far quicker than you might think to make friends. They fitted 32 dogs with a go-pro type camera and a GPS location monitoring device. They then let the dogs wander around an open field on their own, with their owner standing at the edge of the field. Next, they did a test to see how quickly the dogs could make friends with strangers.
They split the dogs into two groups. For one group, a human stranger followed the dog for fifteen minutes, staying less than a meter away at all times, moving around close to the dog. For the other group, a human stranger moved randomly around the same field as the dog, going closer and further away, and not trailing the dog in the same way. For both groups, the strangers avoided looking at or talking to the dogs.
After this, the stranger called the dog, looked at it, and spoke to it for ten seconds, then they turned and walked away without making any further contact. The dogs that had been followed for the first fifteen minutes stayed much closer to the stranger than those that hadn’t. This suggests that mirroring a dog’s behaviour helps to build the relationship between dogs and people. It’s thought to be a consequence of the way that social groups form in dogs naturally, with a pack of dogs waking up together at the start of the day, and doing similar activities at the same time (yawning, stretching, eating etc).
As a vet, it’s useful for me to understand my patients likes and dislikes. I want them to enjoy coming to my clinic without feeling stressed. So I like to create a calm atmosphere, encouraging my patients to lie around, resting in my waiting room if possible. Separate dog and cat areas make this more likely to happen. And if you see me following your dog around, I’m not stalking them: I just want to be friends.