dogs are crepuscular

When Penny was at the vet's today to check up on a recent limp, I weighed her and was alarmed to see she has put on a kilo over the last two months. How could that be? Hmm...would it be the constant trickle of treats when she is doing training? Could it be the regular scraps of toast? (It's a strange feature or our household that there seems to always be someone toasting bread - very mysterious.) Or is it the snacks of carrot, ends of beans, offcuts of sweet potato - a favorite of hers?

I wondered whether we are not exercising her enough, because she seems to be lying around most of the day. Why isn't she racing around the backyard, getting fit? That's how I imagined it would be, before she came to live with us. But the problem is that dogs, being pack animals, will wait for the leader to signal that it's time to go out hunting, so having a large backyard doesn't get around the fact that most dogs won't exercise themselves.

And now I've found out that dogs are crepuscular. That's why they are happy to lie around most of the day, which is very handy for humans who go out to work between 9 and 5.

And if you don't already know the meaning of crepuscular, you might just go over to my other blog to check out the meaning, and thus give the site more than its usual average of two visitors a day.

It was in Stanley Coren's book How Dogs Think that I found out when dogs are most likely to be active.