Animals are creatures of habit. Our two dogs seem to magically know when it’s time to eat, even though they can’t tell time. Or can they? I understand that they wake up with the morning sun, but how do they know when it’s dinner time? Maybe they run over to the microwave and see when the big hand is on the 12 and the little hand is on the 3, and then they know it’s time for dinner. Perhaps with their super-sensitive dog ears and extreme canine intelligence, they can hear the tick-tick-ticking of the clock, and they have counted the 28,800 seconds since their 7am breakfast. This too may be possible. I know this because, it never fails, somewhere between 2:59 and 3:01pm, two big pointy noses get up-close and personal and start whining until they get their dinner.
So, the old saying, “Let sleeping dogs lie,” doesn’t really apply at my house. My dogs don’t lie around. One’s busy checking the time on microwave, and the other is counting the seconds till dinner.
What The Dog Perhaps Hears by Lisel Mueller
If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn’t a shudder
too high for us to hear.
What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.
Toni Andrukaitis 
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