Pets Stuck in Time Warp

By Jim Steal

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings but it seems over ten million dogs in the UK are stuck in a time warp. They have no sense of time extending into the past or the future and will be equally pleased to see you whether they last saw you five minutes ago or five hours ago.

But we are always being told that man’s best friend is so clever. I thought it was fish that only have a three second memory. And now they tell me that this is also rubbish and fish are actually quite good at learning and remembering. So have the canines been playing us for a bunch of fools?

The cause of my exasperation is a recent study on the psychology of rats. Okay, so they can’t retrieve a Frisbee and they’ll have trouble dragging your slippers up the stairs, but from a neurological point of view, they work in pretty much the same way so let’s just run with it.

Laboratory rats (happy and healthy ones I’m sure) were able to track how much time had passed since they found some cheese, but they weren’t able to place it within a specific memory. And how did the scientists know this, you ask. These rats were talking rats presumably? Not quite. An experimental maze was used and continuous rat decisions were measured against time to give an output relating to retention of information. That’s a wordy way of saying “trust me I’m a scientist.”

All these results suggest that rats (and dogs) have episodic memories quite different to humans. Put more simply, if I kiss my wife when I get in from work, and then again five minutes later and then again five minutes after that, she’s going to start to smell a rat (bad choice or animal). She’s going to start to get suspicious.

However, if I did the same to my dog – maybe no kissing this time, just a big hug – he will bound around the room with his big tongue whacking the side of his face, as happy as Larry. Not necessarily because he is equally pleased to see me every time, but because he has no memory of when he last licked my face.

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