“Deep sleepers miss out on the best snack opportunities.”
Until this Sunday. I am steadily more vertical in my pursuits, but not reliably so. I am no kind of dog-scooper, for now, and I’m completely useless as a poop-scooper. Miss Chioux stayed over Saturday, like usual, but she was hugely disappointed in me: I wasn’t playing right. Cathleen was a hero in every way, but I wasn’t good for much until Sunday morning. And, of course, there was no way I could take her to Fellowship Hour.
BFD? It matters to me. I’m trying to figure out what she can figure out, and the reliability of her weekly routine matters to us both. If she was clocking her weeks on the bright spot – Fellowship Hour – then I threw out more than my back. But it matters just because I love her and I want for her to have as much as she can of everything she loves.
How she’ll deal with this exception, I don’t know. I may be expecting too much from her – each day a brand new surprise, too many to keep track of. And yet I know she can clock her days, and many of our other dogs could, too. Ophelia, a Redbone Coon Hound, would come with her lead when she knew by the late-afternoon light that it was walking time – and so she would show up at 11 am on cloudy days.
All dogs – all mammals? all organisms? – live by the sun. Cleo is very playful for a French Bulldog, and we have worked hard to keep her busy – to not let her slip into that lazy torpor that defines too many dogs’ lives. But it’s been fun to watch her sleep cycle follow the sun. She’ll sleep well all winter.
But all domesticated dogs live by a zillion man-made signals as well – your alarm clock and phone alarms, church bells, lunch whistles – a zillion signals you ignore or take in your stride, as needed.
Now think about Daylight Savings Time. Twice a year, half of your dog’s proxy signals go sideways, all at once. I can’t imagine what the dogs make of this, but where are the animal-cruelty harridans? This is no small matter, and it is happening to all dogs, loved and unloved, twice a year.
We don’t do Daylight Savings Time in Arizona, thank the pioneers, so I have no way of testing for disorientation. But to the extent a dog ‘clocks’ his day by man-made clock-effects, rather then by the sun, clock-swapping amounts to deliberately pulling the rug out from under your dog twice a year.
Is this really a matter of consequence – and how could you tell if it is? If you don’t know what anxiety looks like in your dog, you’ll figure it out as you clean things up. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Daylight Savings Time really is a big deal to dogs, at least the first few times, since so much of your dog’s emotional security comes from the universe behaving precisely as it “should.”
And in that regard – in failing to enact the universe as it “should” be – I let Cleo down yesterday.
In other news:
Redfin.com: Miami Has Seen Migration of Homebuyers Triple Since Last Year.
Brad Polumbo: The Supreme Court Just (Finally) Stood Up for Property Rights against the CDC’s Lawlessness: The justices pointed out the shockingly thin legal basis the CDC had tried to use to justify its order. Yeah, but the CDC is going to make a run on firearms, anyway.
Jack Dunphy: Capitol Police Officer Who Shot Ashli Babbitt Speaks (but Shouldn’t Have).
Jonathan Turley: Justified shooting or fair game? Shooter of Ashli Babbitt makes shocking admission.
