Hi Smitty, thanks for the report. Part of what you saw was a bug, and I've changed how the dog works. It's live now.
Two things were going on. First, a dog's age counted the days since you last fed it, even while it sat at home, so a dog you hadn't used in a while came back with a longer rest than it had earned. Second, if you died, the dog went home free but only kept the time it had left, and the whistle never showed that, so it looked like it was sleeping longer.
Here is how it works now:
Each new outing ages the dog one step, and its rest after that gets 15 minutes longer. It starts at 30 minutes, then 45, 60, and so on, up to 12 hours.
The whistle now shows how much time the dog has left. On the app you'll see this after updating to the newest version.
If you die, the dog goes home for free and keeps its time. Call it again and it carries on from there, with no rest and no aging.
If you send it home yourself, that takes 10 minutes off its time and the rest stays on the whistle for next time. If less than 10 minutes were left, it goes to rest instead.
The dog rests when its time runs out, or when the dog itself is knocked out.
Feed resets the rest to the shortest and ends any rest in progress. It does not give the dog a fresh hour.
Every dog and Spider starts young again with this change. If anything still looks off, tell me what the whistle showed and what the dog did, and I'll look into it.