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Prepare Your Pet Now for the End of Daylight Saving Time

Unless you want to be woken up an hour early by a cold nose.
A small dogs is curled asleep on a white rug
Credit: Contributor - Shutterstock

The time change is hard enough on us humans. We won’t have to wake up until an hour later, but we’re slaves to the clock, and so we’ll still figure out how to get ourselves to meetings and appointments on time. But our pets don’t know that the time has changed, so they’ll be confused when their schedule is a bit off. You can make the transition easier by starting to prepare now.

Since it’s fall, we’ll be “falling back” and moving our clocks back an hour. That means a pup who normally wakes you up at 7 a.m. will, if you don’t make any adjustments, start cold-nosing you at six o’clock. From their perspective, everything will happen an hour after they’re expecting it. (In the spring, when we move the clocks forward, the opposite happens, and that same pup will wake you up at eight o’clock.)

So begin adjusting your pet’s schedule now. Get up ten minutes later each day, and adjust other events, like mealtimes, by the same amount. This way, your pet will be ready when the clocks change early this Sunday (daylight saving time ends on Nov. 1, 2020). As a bonus, you’ll be better adjusted to the time change yourself.