Your Dog May Be Wilder Than You Think
This article is about the sleeping patterns of dogs compared to wolves. I am a Sparcheologist and not a dog scientist, but this research doesn’t match my experience. The author does get some things right.
Dogs may look adorable when they snooze, but their sleeping habits actually hold fascinating clues on how living with humans has shaped canine behaviour.
Dogs are very photogenic, and it’s possible that all dogs look adorable when they sleep.
A 2020 study estimated that the average pet dog sleeps for roughly ten hours a day. In reality, it is difficult to determine how much dogs sleep during a 24-hour period because drowsiness (resting with eyes closed) accounts for a considerable proportion of their daily activity.
Maybe they count puppies in this, or those trained sheep dogs in Scotland or New Zealand. Dogs who live with regular people sleep more than 10 hours per day. The bigger problem is that dogs with regular people are always on an alertness spectrum. In the photo above, Sparky is 40% sleeping.
Drowsiness is the wrong word. That suggests an internal state, rather than what’s going on in the environment. Sparky was 40% sleeping, but if I dropped a sausage or said, “car ride”, he would snap into action.
The dog’s ancestor, the grey wolf, tends to show nocturnal (night-time active) or crepuscular (dawn and dusk active) sleep patterns in the wild. That said, wolves can show high variability in their activity, with human disturbance, food availability and weather conditions all influencing their sleep-wake cycles.
I don’t know anything about wolves, but the author talks about high variability caused by external factors. That all sounds reasonable, but the author misses the point that for dogs living with regular people, those external events all depend on the human.
Dogs have a number of sleep stages, including drowsiness, lighter non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and deeper rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where most, although not all, dreaming happens. Dogs devote more of their total sleep time to REM (roughly 2.9 hours a day) than humans (1.9 hours a day).
The first excerpt mentions “resting with eyes closed”. Unless Sparky is sleeping in his crate at night, his eyes are rarely closed. He often blinks with one eye at a time so that I don’t get the jump on him. This video shows Sparky in what appears to be REM sleep, having a vivid dream with his eyes open.
Being an exceptionally considerate dog, Sparky rarely barks in the house. Once when he saw turkeys land in the backyard and once at a black guy delivering my refrigerator. Provocative animals on TV are usually ignored.
Dogs engage in their deepest sleep during the night, and their daytime naps are relatively light. Like other animals, including rats and hedgehogs, dogs often wake up after a period of REM sleep, perhaps an evolutionary adaptation designed to force them out of their slumber to check for dangers in the environment.
This doesn’t correspond to Sparky’s behavior. He sleeps next to my bed, and doesn’t often have vivid dreams with woofing noises.
As dogs get older, their sleep becomes more fragmented, accompanied by decreased bouts of REM sleep at night and increased NREM sleep during the day.
Sparky doesn’t think of himself as an old dog, but he is 11 years old. I haven’t observed any changes in his sleeping habits. He acts as if one of us needs to be alert to threats. If I lie down on the couch, he will hop up and get comfortable. If I stop giving him attention, he squirms around to ascertain my alertness status. If I seem to be sleeping, he figures he better get off and watch the house.
Sparky gets most of his REM sleep in the evening, while I’m online. He assumes that I am engaged enough to catch any problems.
It is clear that our dogs are not wasting their time slumbering on the sofa. There is still much to be learned from exploring the biological rhythms of the animals we share our lives with, so let those sleeping dogs lie.
Sparky acts like an Army soldier in the field. If nothing is happening, get some sleep.