Daylight saving time: Working dogs take a day to adjust, but pets are more flexible - study

A study found Canadian working dogs need a day to recover after daylight saving time, unlike pet dogs. Photo / Ming Fei Li

• A Canadian study found working dogs need a day to recover after daylight saving time, unlike pet dogs.
• The study used motion-sensitive watches to monitor 25 sled dogs and 29 pet dogs.
• Researchers found older pet dogs were less active after the time shift, highlighting the need for gradual changes.

Working dogs need a day to recover after daylight saving time clicks in, however, their domestic counterparts don’t, Canadian researchers say.

Daylight saving is used by many countries to maintain the alignment between daylight hours and human activity patterns, by setting clocks forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the autumn.

Previous research has shown that daylight saving can disrupt human sleep and behaviour but its impact on the domestic animals has not been studied.

To investigate how daylight saving impacts domestic dogs (Canis familiaris), researchers used motion-sensitive watches to monitor the activity patterns of 25 working sled dogs, 29 pet dogs, and their human caregivers living in Canada, during the weeks surrounding the autumn daylight saving time shift.

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For sled dogs, daylight saving represented a change to their strict daily routine.

Before the time shift, sled dog handlers arrived at the reserve at sunrise, but after daylight saving came into effect, sunrise was an hour before their arrival.

As a result of this mismatch, after the time shift, sled dogs were less active in the hour after sunrise than they were before the shift.

However, they didn’t immediately adjust to the change in their routine.

On the day daylight saving came into effect, sled dogs were more active than usual in the hour before their handler’s arrival.

In contrast, pet dogs and their owners showed no change in their morning activity patterns on the Sunday that daylight saving came into effect.

After daylight saving, even though pet owners woke up earlier on weekdays, their pet dogs did not change their morning behaviour.

However, researchers found that age had a significant influence on the dogs’ response, and older pet dogs were less active on the first morning after the time shift.

The study is the first to investigate the impact of daylight saving time on domestic dogs’ activity.

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Changes to human schedules can have a ripple effect on the daily lives of dogs, which may affect their well-being.

The authors said the findings highlighted the importance of flexibility and gradual changes to help dogs adjust to modifications to their daily routine.

“Our study comparing companion and sled dogs finds that flexible routines can help dogs better adjust to abrupt schedule changes like daylight saving time.”

About the study

The peer-reviewed study, The impact of Daylight Saving Time on dog activity, was published in the open-access journal PLOS One by Lavania Nagendran, Ming Fei Li and colleagues at the University of Toronto, Canada.

It was supported through Discovery Grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2020-04159 to L.S. and RGPIN-2020-05942 to D.R.S).