Are Dogs Smart Enough To Know When TV Commercials On?

photo credit: opensourceway

Productive Use Of Time For Dog Grooming

I usually like to make productive use of my time and one of the ways I’ve done that is to do various household chores like cleaning during the TV commercial breaks when I’m watching a program on television. This can also include grooming my two dogs Chester and Roxie as well.

Rather than sit through the TV commercials, I use the few minutes to get something around the house done and by the time a program is over, I would have completed quite a bit of tasks just by doing them during the breaks – see my blog post on productive use of time.

Dog Grooming Sessions During Breaks

My dogs look forward to their nightly grooming sessions which take we now have as a routine down pretty good.  It doesn’t take very long if they are not too tangled.  Most of the time, I groom both of them in one shot.

Sometimes however, I might be doing the dog grooming during a time when a good TV program is on.  This is when I take the TV commercial breaks as the actual time that I would work on the dogs since I don’t want to miss any part of a program I’m watching.

Because I have two dogs to groom, I wouldn’t be able to complete all of the grooming during a single TV commercial break.  So I would usually have to split up the entire process over two TV commercial breaks and they are quite use to this.

Are Dogs That Smart?

The really interesting thing here that kind of freaks me out is that when I’m watching a program and it switches over to the first TV commercial of a break, my dogs seem to know it because they automatically head over to the powder room where I usually do their grooming.  They seem to know when a TV commercial break is coming on!

I wonder if they are watching some other signal like my subtle body movement on the couch or something else which would indicate that it’s time to do grooming.  Or are they really that smart to tell the difference between a regular TV program and a TV commercial?  Or is it something in the sounds of the TV itself that marks the end of a scene of a TV program like a break in volume?

I haven’t figured out what are the actual signals that my dogs are sensing yet but they do seem to know when it’s time to go back to resume dog grooming.  This is not exactly something that was taught to them through basic dog obedience training.  It must be something else.

If anybody has insights, guesses or comments about whether dogs are really that smart to know when the TV commercials come on, please share below.