Living With Pets

By Brenda Williams

Living with pets can be a dream come true or a nightmare depending on your experience with pets and that particular pet's natural tendencies. For example, there are a lot of people in the United States who adamantly prefer to adopt dogs over cats because dogs are more easily trained than their feline counterparts. However, with a little training and some creative thinking, owning a cat can be just as gratifying.

The first thing that you will naturally want to consider before you adopt a pet is the layout of your home as well as the things that you own inside of your home. Will you allow your pet to have free reign of your house? Will the pet be restricted to just one room of the house? What sorts of restrictions will you impose (if any) when it comes to the safety and well being of not only your pet but your furniture as well? There are many things to consider.

Once, when I went over to one of my friends houses, she had two cats and a small dog and wall to wall carpeting. I would usually be ok for the first five minutes before I started wheezing and then it would go downhill fairly quickly after that to the point where I absolutely could not breathe. It's one thing if you own pets, but it is quite another thing to consider the guests that you may or may not have over to your home. For instance, not everyone is fond of animals, and even those who are fond of animals cannot necessarily tolerate them due to the pet dander that is left behind as well other factors. Remember, if you are going to live with a pet, you have to be even more diligent about keeping things clean and organized. The more crevices and clutter that you leave out, the more dust, pet dander and opportunity that your pets will have to get into something that they shouldn't.

If you live in an apartment building and own a pet, you may not necessarily have a say when it comes to trading in your wall to wall carpeting for some nice, shiny hardwood floors. If this is the case, you may want to invest in a couple of hepa filters to throw around the apartment. Additionally, a good vacuum is a must. The vacuum should also state somewhere on it that it has or uses a hepa filter. Hepa filters are specially designed to trap pet dander, dust, and other allergens that are in the air, making it a little easier to breathe. Vacuuming should be done the day before you are expecting company- not the day of. If you have to vacuum on the same day that you are expecting company, try to vacuum as many hours in advance, and then exit the apartment if you have allergies because you would have stirred up a lot of airborne allergens.

Living with an animal means lots of training and even more patience. For example, I used to own a leather couch. I had just bought it at a time when I was sharing a town home with one of my friends. Shortly after I got the leather couch, her mother gave her a puppy. Suddenly, we had to train a puppy to not tear up the furniture. This required a lot of patience as well as crate training before we were able to leave the dog out in the house while no one was home; however, it can be done.