::: 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." :::
They do it for themselves, not the cats. The cats know when it's mealtime, unless mealtime happens at a new random time every day.
Do something your cat enjoys at a specific time every day for a couple days, and you've got yourself a furry alarm clock that will make sure to remind you of the time if you forget.
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.
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.)