If you have a dog as a pet, you may have already wondered if the dogs miss their owners.
It doesn’t matter if you were only gone for 5 minutes, your pet probably welcomes you as if you’ve been away for months.
But do you know if this really means he misses you?
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Do dogs miss their owners or not?
Before answering whether dogs miss their owners, we have to consider something important: is their memory good enough?
Can they keep a souvenir to remember you later?
The short answer to that question would be: yes, they can.
But how can this kind of thing be measured?
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The memory of animals
Just like you, many people have had this type of doubt before.
Do dogs miss their owners?
With this in mind, a group of Swedish scientists decided to subject a series of different animals to some memory tests.
Documenting all the details of the results, they created a study of different species and their ability to store memories.
Thus, they discovered that dogs’ recent memory may not be the best.
It only lasts between 2 and 5 minutes.
This, however, is just one of the points to be taken into consideration.
Many other studies were conducted in different parts of the world and using the most varied methodologies.
One study in particular, carried out in Hungary, showed that more than 30% of dogs can imitate something their owner taught them, more than an hour after the original command.
But what does this have to do with missing?
To know if dogs miss their owners, we need to know if they remember their owners.
And as we saw above, they remember.
And they remember it very well.
What science has not yet been able to discover is how dogs calculate the passage of time.
We know that their recent memory performance is not the best.
Therefore, it is natural that after being away for 5 minutes they celebrate your “return”, as if much more time had passed.
However, despite the difficulty in understanding the passage of time, scientists were able to verify that the longer the owner’s absence, the more distressed the animals become.
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Age
The study of dog memory also pointed to the existence of something they called Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, which often affects older dogs.
With it, dogs miss their owners in much shorter periods of time, such as a quick absence to go to the bathroom, for example.
Furthermore, some animals may simply forget that that person is the owner.
Canine Cognitive Dysfunction is very similar to Alzheimer’s disease and, in addition to the loss of recent memory, can significantly affect your pet’s behavior.
Less than 30% of dogs up to 12 years old suffer from this type of disease, but from the age of 15 the number increases significantly and reaches close to 70%.
Do you think your dog misses you? Does he receive you in any different way?
Share your experience in the comments!
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