How does daylight saving time affect dogs? What the only study found

Not in the way you do. Nobody told your dog that it is now 6 a.m. instead of 7. What your dog has is a very good internal clock set by daylight, by its stomach, and by the sound of your alarm, your car and your key in the door. Dr. Jerry Klein, the AKC’s chief veterinarian, puts it simply: dogs wake and sleep according to daylight, so their bodies follow the sun’s rhythm rather than counting hours.

That is why the time change feels like nothing to your dog and like a lot to your dog at the same time. The sun does what it always did. You are the one who suddenly starts doing everything an hour off. In the fall, when clocks go back, breakfast arrives an hour late by your dog’s reckoning, dinner arrives an hour late, and the walk that used to happen in daylight now happens in the dark.

For years every article on this topic ran on vibes. Then in January 2025 a University of Toronto team published what they describe as the first study of daylight saving time and dog activity, in the journal PLOS ONE. They put small motion sensors (the same kind used in human sleep research) on the collars of 25 sled dogs at a working kennel in Ontario and on 29 pet dogs in homes, plus the wrists of the pet dogs’ owners, and recorded activity minute by minute across the fall “fall back” change.

The two groups told different stories. The sled dogs live on a rigid schedule: their handlers arrive at 7:30 a.m. sharp. On the first morning after the clocks went back, the sled dogs were far more active around that arrival time than usual, which the authors read as the dogs being up and waiting for handlers who, by the sun, were now an hour late. By the next day they were back to normal. The paper’s summary line is that sled dogs took one day to adjust.

The pet dogs, all huskies and malamutes to keep breed differences out of the picture, showed no significant change in morning activity at all. Their owners did: the humans woke earlier on the weekdays after the change, a small dose of the “social jetlag” that follows every clock shift. The dogs simply didn’t follow them. The authors’ explanation is that household routines are already loose (different people, different workdays, weekends), so a one-hour shift is within the normal noise of a pet dog’s life.

One wrinkle is worth knowing if you share your home with a senior. Older pet dogs were less active on the first morning after the change than at baseline, a result the researchers called unexpected and flagged for further study. Their advice is to be especially careful about sudden routine changes with older dogs. It is one study, in one region, over one fall change, so treat it as the best evidence available rather than the last word.

Because your dog is still on the old schedule, and in the fall the old schedule now runs an hour ahead of yours. If breakfast used to land at 7:00, your dog’s stomach still expects it at what is now 6:00. So you get the stare, the sigh, the paw on the bed. At the other end of the day the same thing happens with dinner, and Whole Dog Journal’s Stephanie Colman describes the result well: a dog convinced it is about to starve, pleading harder as the clock creeps toward the time it thinks is mealtime.

AKC Reunite’s training advice calls the fall change the harder of the two, for exactly this reason: in the fall everything your dog cares about, especially dinner and the family coming home from work and school, lands an hour later than it used to. Their expectation: a week or so, and most dogs take it in stride.

If your dog goes to daycare, the building’s hours don’t move with your sleep schedule either. A dog used to a 7 a.m. drop-off may spend the first few mornings confused about why the car is leaving so early. Our story on dog daycare drop-off hours shows how early most facilities open.

The advice from vets, shelters and trainers all lands in the same place: don’t move everything an hour in one morning. Spread it out.

1. Start about a week before the change. The Humane Society of Missouri suggests moving meals, walks and playtime in steps of at least 15 minutes over roughly a week. AKC Reunite offers a slower version for dogs that struggle: shift by 30 minutes the first week and the remaining 30 the next.
2. Move meals first. Food is the anchor of a dog’s day. In the fall, feed a little later each day; in the spring, a little earlier.
3. Keep bedtime steady. AKC Reunite recommends holding bedtime at the same clock time so at least one part of the day doesn’t drift.
4. Fill the gap. If your dog is pacing before the new, later dinner, a short walk or a few minutes of training eats up the wait and takes its mind off the bowl.
5. Use the extra evening hour. In the fall you gain an hour on the first evening. A bonus walk is the one part of the time change your dog will actively enjoy.

Colman adds a longer-term fix: feed within a window rather than at a fixed minute. A dog fed “sometime between 6 and 7” learns to expect a range, and a clock shift disappears inside it. If you keep the old schedule after the change, the study above suggests most pet dogs won’t mind either way; the gradual shift is for the dogs that do.

Usually, yes. When the clocks go forward, breakfast and dinner arrive an hour early by your dog’s reckoning, and very few dogs object to early food. The human side is harder: you lose an hour of sleep and your dog does not, so the early-morning wake-up is more likely to be you nudging a sleeping dog than the other way around.

The Toronto study only measured the fall change, so there is no direct data on spring. The same logic applies, though: the dogs that notice are the ones on the tightest routines, and the fix is the same slow shift, in the other direction. Watch the walks as well as the meals. After the spring change your evening walk is suddenly in daylight and, in much of the country, warmer; after the fall change it is in the dark, which calls for a light or reflective gear on both of you.

A few days of early wake-ups, a bit of pacing before dinner, or a dog that seems puzzled by the dark evening walk is normal and passes within a week or two. The AKC notes that some dogs do take it harder, with anxiety, an upset stomach or a house-training accident. Those usually trace back to a routine that moved too fast, and settle once the schedule does.