Daylight Saving Time will not affect your cat in my considered opinion.
In the UK, Daylight Saving Time takes place this year on Sunday, 25 March 2018. You move your watch forward a hour. The USA also has Daylight Saving Time. It takes place on Sunday 11th March at 2 am in the morning. These are moments when we can tell ourselves that spring has sprung.
The question I am asking is whether it affects our domestic cat companions. I will take a commonsense approach. Although many people don’t like daylight saving time (I am one of those people) it hardly affects us in terms of our biological clock.
We get over it very quickly. Within a few days we have settled into the new regime. Indeed it is likely to be faster than that. Domestic cats have a similar anatomy and physiology to ours. Therefore I’m going to state very confidently that the domestic cat is almost totally unaffected by moving the clocks forward by one hour.
Not only is their physiology similar to ours, they are probably more adaptable than humans. Domestic cats are enormously adaptable. They fit into our way of life. Also cats have very flexible sleeping arrangements.
All cat owners know how cats do not sleep at night as humans do. They sleep whenever they want to. They sleep in the daytime and sometimes at night. They are normally active, as we know, at dawn and dusk. This inbuilt fluidity and flexibility of the domestic cat’s psyche makes him or her more able to adapt to daylight saving time than humans (if an adaptation is required in the first place). And as humans adapt to it very quickly themselves, domestic cats don’t notice it.
There is a veterinary aspect to this which is for diabetic cats receiving insulin injections (or other medications to be administered at set times). However, the one hour time change, I’m told, is too small to make a difference. Although an owner of a diabetic cat administering insulin injections should perhaps consult with their veterinarian for complete clarity.
