::: spoiler Transcription A Bluesky post from "Slippy", @damnslippy.slippy.me, with a profile picture of a woman with short, purple hair holding a knife: Sincerely delighted to discover, 45 minutes into this nearly-wordless three-hour documentary about French monks who take vows of silence, that among the reasons they \*can\* talk is "to make sure the monastery cats know when it's mealtime by making little kitty-calling noises at them." :::
Not just cats. That's the Pavlovian response. Even YOU and I can be similarly trained.
Yes, but cats love routine, and follow it as much as possible, like a clock.
You can train a dog to respond a certain ways to certain signals, but you can't train it to wake you up every day at a certain specific time, unless it can recognise some signal. But cats will train themselves to do that, if they get something out of it, and are by nature well aware of the time of day, with surprising precision.
Of course, if you train your cat to wake you up for work, better be ready to be woken up at the same time on weekends, unless there's some noticeable enough difference (like traffic noise on the street outside) between workdays and holidays and you're lucky to have a sufficiently smart cat who can notice the difference. Cats might be quite adequate clocks, but they're not calendars.
My dog always woke me up at a consistent time every morning. I didn't train her to do that, and I don't know what the signal was (other than the position of the sun, I guess). I used to hate it, because it was always too early, but I eventually got used to it.
Maybe I was the trainee, in this case 😆
If she could see the sun, or hear people moving outside, or anything like that, yeah, a smart dog can easily learn to recognise those signals.
Yeah, I think it was the sun. She probably trained me to follow her own circadian rhythm, using her cuteness and affection to convince me to comply lol
I'm not allowed to sleep past 9am without feeding the cat. She dose not give up.
Do people change their pets feeding time when the clocks change (daylights savings)?
Probably not, but when it's an hour later than usual cats will complain, and probably get stressed. (If it's one hour early they'll happily eat it, but might ask for seconds and hour later.)