Petey Can Tell Time

Petey is a very smart dog, as I'm sure you're well aware from earlier posts. He is so smart he can tell time. He knows when it is 9:00 pm. We know this because every night without fail, regardless of what else is going on the house, Petey wants to go out at 9:00 pm. It is really a funny thing, at exactly 9:00 Petey will walk to the back door to go out. He'll walk back to wherever we are in the house, look at us with some disdain, since we know that it is time to go out, and walk back to the back door. If on an evening, John and I are really on top of things and realize that it is almost 9:00, we still can't get to the back door before Petey.

We've tried several experiments to see what triggers Petey to go out but it really does not matter what we're doing or what Petey's doing - at 9:00 he goes out. The only thing that ever gets him off track is changing the time to & from daylight saving time. It will take him a day or two to adjust his internal Petey clock.

The evening 'run' as we call it is followed by the 'go to bed' ritual. Petey is ready to go to bed as soon as he returns to the house. The only problem is Petey won't go to bed without us, and we aren't always ready to go to bed at 9:00 pm!! This hardly ever occurs, actually. Apparently, Petey thinks there is something in the going out side ritual that triggers bedtime, so if we don't go to bed within about 10 minutes, he'll want to go out again. He is a determined little fellow, and quite hard to dissuade, so it is easier to let him out every 10 minutes between 9:00 and whenever we go to bed, than it is to distract him.

When we finally go to bed we encounter a whole new set of 'rules', but that is a post for another time...