Animals are very aware of time. Geese need to travel thousands of miles to flee their breeding grounds before the snows, and return just when the thaw takes hold. When I hunted, the Elk would split the herds up just before the season began, and the bulls would hunker in the deepest thickets, where but few hunters had the fortitude to go.
Some herds actually flee the forests altogether, and wait out the season in suburban fields, where they cannot be hunted. They are much smarter than most of us think. Mature buck deer do much the same, although the blacktails here don't herd, but are dispersed throughout the range singly. During hunting season, mature bucks only come out at night to feed. This is why hunters must be in places to hunt by dawn, or just before dusk, to catch out the overeager and stragglers.
Many animals hibernate, and many more are quite sensitive to time of day. Our free brothers, the wild animals, have far greater sensitivity to what time it is than do we captive thralls, with our fire; light that pushes back the night that we can serve our overlords the longer.
Of course, I am sure that even plants can be aware of time in that way. But that is a very primitive way of understanding time. The human can be aware of a time from which he will not even live, or from which he never lived, the human has a truly complex understanding of time. If we had an animal understanding of time, we could not have made any progress that we have made as a society.
The Elk and Deer predict the season accurately without clocks or calendars. They do this because they know if they do not, they will die.
I do not see what makes our understanding of time more advanced.
Well, humans can predict, plan and manage complex organizations with a much more accurate forecast of time than an animal, being able to measure all kinds of unpredictable variability.
Humans can also understand more precisely, the effects of current and past causes, to foresee the future. It is said that the sun will go out within 4500 million years, whether true or not, the fact that the human can capture in his brain this figure, and the fact that he can find alternatives so that a future society can avoid this catastrophe, it tells us a lot about the superior understanding of time for the human. An animal could not even understand such a large amount of time.
Not to put a spam comment in here but this interaction; the string of comments, is what I like about this platform the most.
I didn’t think much about animals and time, yes they do hibernate, migrate and the like but the aspect of ‘time’ as we know it seems to be a human construct.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. I don't think it's a construction, but an idea, a much deeper way of understanding time.