Question:
Why are dogs so impatient? Humans seem to be able to wait many times as long without issue. Why can't dogs?
Answer:
Dogs can often seem rather impatient, almost even whiny perhaps. They love your constant attention, and can easily get despondent or irritated at being ignored. They need to pee every few hours, where you can hold it all day. They will often jump on you if you’re going too slow for them. They even demand to be fed every single day.
What is it in dogs that creates this neediness? The answer is their unique interaction with the flow of time. While for humans 365¼ days makes up over year, a dog will traverse seven years in that time frame. This unique canine chronohodology makes dogs at least appear more impatient to those of us with a standard flow of time. While you may only be waiting 30 seconds to eat, your dog has already waited three and a half dog minutes for his food. You may get annoyed at your dog needing to pee after just 4 hours, but from his perspective, it’s already been 1⅙ days since he last got to relieve himself.
Truth:
“Dog years” are just unit of age used as an approximate frame of reference to understand dogs’ faster aging. E.g., it’s common for humans to live roughly 70 years, and it’s common for dogs to live roughly 10 years, so converting dogs’ age to “dog years” helps to understand where they are in their lives relative to our own.
Dogs do not actually experience time significantly different than we do. They just have a lot of energy and thus want to do things with it, and they love being with their people and thus do not like being apart or ignored for long times. Also, since they are smaller yet drink water proportional to their energy levels, their little bladders cannot hold their urine for as long.
Training dogs to wait, self-settle, and not jump on people will all help them seem more patient. Lots of exercise is also a great boon to making patient pups!