How do you survive time change?
It's that time of year again. The time where we randomly decide to delay our pets' dinner by an hour for no explicable reason.
My dog has been getting antsy and frantic for her 5 pm dinner starting at 4 pre-time change, so time change is going to be rough. Today I fed her at 4:30 EST/5:30 DT (Dog Time), but holding on that long was a challenge with how frantic she gets. We've joked about just leaving the house for an hour or so every day just to evade her. As the week goes on, I fear it may become less of a joke. (No advice needed for the record. We go through this every year, she'll adapt... Eventually.)
So how about the rest of you dealing with time change? How gracefully do your pets accept the sudden schedule change? Anyone else considering just becoming daily regulars at your nearest store?
They really don't accept it, I've been working for the past week to get my cats regular feeding time pushed back around an hour but I suspect they'll still wake me up early tomorrow.
I am constrained as well by my work schedule and the 12 hour length of the insulin. I can't really adjust more than an hour at a time and a half hour is better.
But mostly I've been working on it for a while.
This is my first time change with a cat, and I've also been prepping for about a week by pushing out feeding time a little later. I'm not quite up to the full hour yet.
The cat is suppppper food motivated and will whine for food up to an hour before feeding time (even when i accidentally overfed and he put on weight), so I'm used to ignoring his fake pleas during the adjustment.
Is there a particular reason to feed pets at a different time when the time changes? If you feed them right when you get back from work I suppose it is what it is, but otherwise I’m not sure there’s much value.
Personally I adjust my alarms so I’m waking up at the same time. I would prefer waking up earlier anyhow, so it’s a good excuse when everything else shifts down. Eventually life and late night outs will drag my sleeping schedule back to match standard time, but that’s a gradual change.
When I had the automatic feeders I just kept the time the same but without, mine is constrained around those work hours so I have to.
...our cats free-feed most of the time and our dog has learned that she'll be fed when we're ready, not on a consistent schedule...
(the latter took some deliberate training for her to associate insistence with further delay)
I thought mine woke me up at 6:40 this morning and was super proud of her. Joke was on me, my watch hadn't synced yet and it was actually 5:40. Her breakfast time varies between 5 am and 6 am on weekdays and is usually later on the weekends. Dinner (4 pm always) will be the real test. She usually starts shaking and begging at 3 pm. She's already doing that and it's a quarter after 2.
It's gonna be a little tough this time, I fear.
...i gave our dog a chewy at four o'clock and i'm looking forward to seeing daylight before work; i'll miss daylight in the evenings but it's the cozy time of year so i'm content to snuggle-in with fantasy and a warm cup of chai...
...i'll grumble more when we get started at a god-forsaken hour after four short months of natural daylight...
I vary feeding times daily so today wasn't exceptional.
My dog gets fed breakfast at roughly the same time on weekdays (sometime between 7-8am), but otherwise he doesn't have a fixed feeding time. He gets his breakfast on weekends after we wake up (whenever that is), and he gets his dinner after we eat our dinner (whenever that is). He also only gets fed if he goes to his dog bed in the dining room, where he goes when given the "spot" command.
So, while he might get a bit antsy during time changes, he'll go to his spot whe he's hungry rather than bothering me. Also, he's used to having some variation to his mealtime, so it's not strange for him to wait a few extra hours for a meal.
My cat is on an auto feeder that permanently stays using the offset it was originally set to. It isn't internet connected or anything that would change it so from my cat's perspective nothing changed.
My dog is a super inconsistent eater that never cared about fixed feeding times. Prior to having a toddler that would get into his food his bowl would just be topped up twice a day, but he rarely ate both meals and almost never immediately. Now that we can't leave his choking hazard sized food out he gets fed when he asks, but he isn't even remotely consistent about what time of day he does.
So a long winded way to say I do nothing to accommodate the time change.