I have never stopped to think of the effect of the switch to daylight saving time (DST) on my pets.

I mean, eat, sleep, repeat– what is there that an hour would affect? But if a pet is in tune with their owners’ schedules, the one hour jump can cause confusion.

I will admit that Half seems to panic in the fall when we are not up on time, but I thought he was just taking advantage of the opportunity to climb on my chest and be in my face while I was trying to sleep.

Animals use their internal clocks or circadian rhythm to tell them when to wake up, eat and sleep.

With pets this is less about natural sunlight and more about electrical circuit completion. In other words, we set our pets’ routines.

“Animals that live with humans develop routines related to human activity — for example, cows become accustomed to being milked at particular times of day, or pet dogs become accustomed to going for walks or being fed at a particular time of day,” said Holdhus-Small, a research assistant at CSIRO Livestock Industries, an Australia-based research and development organization.

“When humans apply daylight saving time to their own lives, if they carry out their routine according to the clock, the animals can become confused.”

Holdhus-Small uses the milk cow as the example of why the farmers refused to use the “new” time.

When the clocks fall back in the fall and the farm owner arrives an hour “later” to milk the cows, they will be at the barn, bellowing because their internal routine tells them that the farmer is late.

On the other hand, in the spring, the cows will think the farmer is an hour too early and will not come to be milked until the “proper” time.

“When humans change the clocks for daylight saving, to suit our preferred working environment, from an animal’s point of view, we are suddenly behaving oddly,” Holdhus-Small said. “To the animals, it is inexplicable that suddenly dinner is an hour later or earlier than expected.”

For the cows, it is easy to see that milking an hour “late” will cause physiologic stress. But this can affect house pets, also.

It is conceivable that pets could be annoyed when they find an empty food bowl at “feeding time”.

But unlike those farmers without corporate or public jobs, we cannot ignore daylight savings time.

A good compromise therefore, might be to change a few minutes a day rather than a whole hour at once.

This may alleviate some paw-holding and grumpiness, at least on the pet’s part. In the meantime, be thankful that you are not a school teacher trying to teach first period this week!

Background for this article was provided by Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.com

M.J. Wixsom practices veterinarian medicine at Guardian Animal Medical Center in Flatwoods, Ky. For questions, call 606-928-6566.