Many of the standard practices applied to our domestic animals – be they household pets, agricultural livestock or working animals – are based upon anthropomorphic projection: two, three or four fixed meals every day; bringing animals indoors in the evening so they can get a good night’s sleep; providing them with a comfortable bed to sleep on in their own little private space… practices that we, as humans, find comforting and safe. Three good meals to nourish us; shutting the nasty world out, creating our own little spot away from the dangers of the dark; the relaxation and the regeneration of energy provided by good sleep. But do our animals search for these things too? Are they comforted in the same way? Do they have the same nutritional desires or needs? Generally the answer is NO. Cats and dogs have a relatively inverted sleep need compared with humans: where broadly speaking a human spends 16 hours waking and 8 hours sleeping every 24 hours, a dog or cat will often spend 16 hours sleeping and 8 hours waking – this needs to be nuanced, for cats and dogs these periods are cumulative and not usually contiguous. Being carnivores/omnivores, cats, dogs – and humans – have similar feeding requirements as far as regularity is concerned. All can go without food for extended periods with little or no serious negative effects (except maybe being irritable!). Eating two or three meals a day (four is the minimum advised for cats due to their limited stomach capacity) is comfortable and generally ties in with our circadian energy consumption. But for other animals, particularly herbivores, the requirements are often radically different. Feeding habits and needs will often be adapted to the animal’s position in the food chain. Such habits, together with the position in the food chain, have a major effect upon the animal’s circadian rhythm. Domestication and lack of natural predators will not have changed these adaptations and imposing an unnatural diet and regularity can pose serious health risks. Granted, certain impositions have been necessary over the years considering they way humans have exploited certain species: the horse, cattle, hunting hounds; the natural disposition of certain species to burrow, jump or fly in order to escape confinement: rabbits, birds… But for the modern ‘leisure’ horse (there are very few workhorses in Europe these days – almost all are confined to Belgium where they are used for low-tide shrimp fishing in Oostduinkerke, and for timber recovery in the Ardennes forests where motorized vehicles cannot pass), observation shows us a different lifestyle and requirements than those imposed.