Don’t forget Fido and Fifi!

Pets or animal companions are important to many of us and we want them to live happy lives.

Living a happy life, for a pet, may not mean getting to do whatever is desired—shredding the living room curtains earns few “good kitty” points but in lots of cases, when a cat or a dog lives in a place that meets their fundamental feline or canine needs they’re less likely to try to come up with new and clever ways to amuse themselves (involving curtains, for instance).  This article will cover how to create a place where your cat or dog feels as at home and as comfortable as you do—which is particularly important at this time of year when your cat or dog may be spending more hours inside than it has in the last few months.

And this article will also focus on homes for dogs and cats.

Snakes, iguanas, parrots, horses, and guinea pigs can all make fine pets and bring all the humans who encounter them great joy, all while living the pleasantest of existences—but the best places for them to live are in their own special habitats with only occasional, well supervised, excursions from them.  Those special rules and excursions come with their own protocols and Googling what those are is the best way to keep your non-cats and non-dogs doing their best.

Fish are a very special sort of pet.  People rarely get the chance to touch them (usually that happens only when something dies and needs to be scooped from the tank) so they don’t bond emotionally to their fish pets the way they do to dogs and cats—some fish do manage to live for longish periods of time in their tanks, however, and that leads to a relationship of sorts between them and the person with dominion over the fish food container.  Looking at fish swim in an aquarium is calming, lowering stress levels, and mentally refreshing whether or not we’ve ever fed the fish in question, have any sort of relationship at all with them at all.  So whether you want to think of them as a pet or as a therapeutic agent, having some fish in your life is a good idea—but the management, placement, etc., of their tanks is also a specialized and technical chore we won’t talk about in this article.

Designing for cats and dogs is top of mind with lots of people now for reasons beyond the flurry of pandemic adoptions from animal shelters.

In 2022, An Immense World – How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong was published.  Its pages are packed with intriguing information about how animals, some pets, some not, use whatever senses they happen to have to understand the worlds around them and to achieve their life goals.  The olfactory-centred world of dogs is covered in great detail, for instance, and no dog “owner” will ever relate to their pet the same way again after they learn how dogs’ noses drive how they think and behave.