What is a dog’s sense of time?
When I think about my life with Sharav, it’s only time – the time we did this, how much time it took to do that, all the time we spent walking side-by-side, how he changed over time – but did he perceive time at all?
Was his entire idea of his own life just a very long 15-minute interval that was constantly getting stretched into the present, with me around all the time, and other humans around sporadically?
Did he grasp that he was getting older, that I was getting older?
Did he understand that different people and scenery meant different neighborhoods, different cities, different coasts, different continents, changing seasons?
Did he have memories of his own youth? Would he have identified those events as having happened in his distant or not-so-distant past?
Gazing across the Hudson River. New York, November 2016. Click any photo to see more.