Episode 186: Benefits and Challenges of Pets
This is Episode 186: The Benefits and Challenges of Owning Pets. This topic is top of mind for me today, as I woke up at 5:00 AM with our six-month-old puppy, to let him out, see if he needed a drink of water.
We’re doing great training and it’s going well. It’s also a challenge. Puppies are so fun and so cute and hard. This got thinking about my own experience with pets throughout my life and our decision over the past seven years to own pets.
I want to share what that looks like, how some of the decisions happen, some of the systems that we have in place, some recommendations that I have that I really love with regards to pet care.
Also, I’ll share some of the research-backed benefits and obstacles to owning and caring for pets in your home.
Segment: Odd Jobs
I want to start this episode with a segment that I call odd jobs.
Many of the years of my youth were spent as a nanny for one family. As the girls that I watched got older, went to high school and eventually to college, I maintained working for the family very regularly as a house and pet sitter.
At the time. The family had four dogs. They had a tiny little fawn-colored Chihuahua named Poppy. They had two pugs; a black male pug named Chuck. And now I can’t remember, there was a brown female pug whose name is slipping my mind (it’s Chloe). And they also had a big, giant black lab who was female. I don’t remember her name. It’ll come back to me at some point (Bella, I think?)
Pet sitting looked like feeding, walking, and playing with and sleeping with these animals. The pugs, especially one, would nestle in between my legs and Chuck, the male pug would sleep on top of my head. Essentially like between my shoulder and my head.
If you can picture a pug, they’re flat face. They have these big eyes and squashy noses, and he would hold haul all night long, next to my ear. So, this was my pet sitting experience.
I was then referred to another friend who had just one dog and a parakeet. When I went to, I don’t remember the name of the dog or the parakeet in this situation, but I remember going to pet sit at the friend of my regular family’s house while they were away for vacation.
The dog was so easy to take care of, just calm and, and around. We’d go on walks and then we’d come back, and they just be chill. My instructions with the parakeet were to leave the door open and just replace the food in the water. The parakeet would kind of take care of itself. And this is so funny to think back on now that I didn’t have a lot of experience—or any experience with birds.
I never had a bird growing up and I was a little bit maybe concerned about birds generally. Like they’re long talons and they’re very sharp beaks and the parakeet would kind of keep to itself. So, it wasn’t too worried about it until one day I went into the kitchen in the morning while I was pet sitting.
I think it was probably prepping food for the dog or myself. And I hear a click click, click, click, click. I’m barefoot and I turned around and the parakeet is coming toward me kind of approaching. I think I probably said shoe, you know, trying to move back. It lifted its wings and came toward me faster, as if it was going to peck me or attack me!
I jumped up the counter with my feet above the floor so that the bird couldn’t get me. And I think I sat on the counter like that for a good solid couple of minutes while the bird calmed down and then eventually went on its way. It had clipped wings, so it couldn’t fly, but it had it out for me that morning.
I just remember feeling like my poor bare feet were so vulnerable to the talons and the beak of this parakeet that could possibly rip me to shreds. I did survive all my pet sitting adventures. And I think that having that experience, not only of growing up with pets and I’ll talk more about my experience with my own pets at home where I didn’t do a lot. I wasn’t in charge of feeding or walking or caring for the pets within my own home.
Having the experience of being a paid pet center, where I was on the schedule of feeding, walking, cleaning up after taking care of these animals really contributed to my experience in my ability to have a little bit more understanding when we decided to embark on our own personal pet journey as a family.
So, thank you to the pugs and to the lab and to poppy and to the other dog. And even to the crazy little parakeet for giving me the experience that I needed to become a pet owner in my own life.
Miranda’s Long History of Family Pets
I thought I’d start off by just giving you a fun history of my experience with pet ownership through my life. I came from a pet family, and I think in talking to friends and colleagues and associates, it seems like there’s like a hereditary component, not biological, but cultural component to pet ownership.
If you grew up in a family with pets, you tend to be more likely to want to have pets or to feel attached to the idea of owning pets as your own family emerges. If you grew up in a family without pets, you tend to not be as interested.
I haven’t seen like a research study on this, but that’s in just conversations with people that I know that that seems to be a through line that people who grew up with pets and a particular type of pet. Like if you had dogs, you tend to be a dog person. If you had cats, you tend to like cats.
Dave is an exception. He had a bunny, and he had a dog at different points for short periods during his childhood. When we met and were married, was very ambiguous about the idea of owning pets.
I, on the other hand was sure that pet ownership was in my future when it would work out with our finances and living situation.
The Early Years: Captain, Spring, and Sadie
Let me give you a little background on my experience with pets. My first pets, most of my pets growing up were dogs. When I was young, when I was born a child, my family had two dogs. We had a Springer Spaniel named Captain, and we had a Yorkshire Terrier named Spring.
I don’t have a lot of memories of Captain. I was very young when he was around. I think he was high energy. And when we moved Spring, the little Yorkshire Terrier disappeared. I’m not kidding. Like my parents thought she must’ve been stolen from our yard.
I was young, but Spring literally disappeared. She was a full bred Yorkshire Terrier. I remember a little conversation around if someone found her, they would have just kept her cause she was a great dog and she was beautiful and well-trained, and so she just absolutely disappeared.
At the same time, Captain who was the high, high energy Springer Spaniel, the decision was made to give him to a family that had a ranch and a lot of land we were moving into. And you know, as I’m saying that, I’m like, I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened to Captain, because this was one of those things when I was little, I don’t know. I know Captain didn’t come with us to the new house where there were a lot of kids in the neighborhood. There is some concern about him not having the space that he would need to manage his energy level at that time.
I should have checked in with my parents about what exactly happened to Spring and Captain, but those are my first pets.
At this point, we move into the house that my parents live in now. The house I grew up in. We move into what I will call our Shetland Sheepdog phase. We had Shelties for several years, the first one was Sadie and everyone in our family will tell you that Sadie was believed to be the very best dog that we had ever had.
She was well-trained. She was beautiful. Her one fatal flaw that ended up being fatal is that she chased cars. We lived at the top of a cul-de-sac and because she was so good. You know, one of the things, when you have a well-trained dog, they can spend some time off leash and still be safe because they have good recall.
And yet she would chase cars. Eventually was run over by a car because of chasing it. So sad. And I was, this is like one of my childhood traumas that I was young, probably eight. I was there and I heard her yelp and I looked over and she was still alive, but had been, hit, you know, stunned by the car.
My parents weren’t home. My neighbor was out doing some gardening and she was an animal lover as well. My neighbors had iguanas and pigs and chinchillas and goats and dogs. My neighbor, Leslie came and helped me help with Sadie, but she didn’t make it. Poor Sadie. She was my parents would still say the best dog they ever had.
Saucy, Bailey, Moqui, and Ollie the cat
Well that their current dog probably rivals her, but we went, we had Sadie and then we had Saucy who was also a Shetland sheepdog. They are called Shelties. They’re kind of like mini collie’s. If you can picture like a Lassie dog, a Collie, a Shetland sheepdog are mini versions a collie. They have this long flowy hair.
I don’t remember a lot about Saucy. I remember that she was around, she was good, but everyone kept comparing her to Sadie. She wasn’t quite as good as Sadie, but she was, she was a good dog. At one point I was given a dog for Christmas. This is when I was a teenager. I got Bailey who was another Shetland sheepdog. He was a male and he was black and white. And I had Bailey for about a year.
I went out of town touring for an entertainment company, which I did a lot of from 12 to 18. I performed with an entertainment company, a touring company, and I was gone for about two or three weeks or so. And I came back, and Bailey was gone. He had run away while I was gone, but because I did, he was sort of my dog and I think I paid more attention to him than maybe other people. He didn’t come back.
I mean, this is sad, right? I’m just going through it. Maybe you’re thinking, gosh, you shouldn’t have been pet owners, but we did have some long-lasting pets.
Sadie was a long time. I think Captain and Spring were long time. Saucy and Bailey were both bad lucks. Then we got a golden retriever named Moqui and Moqui was sort of like the thread, the through thread from my middle school all the way until she, she just passed away a few years ago. So, she was a very long time pet.
Moqui was a really wonderful golden retriever. Sweet. Lovely. Came with us places, you know, hiking and camping and traveled. She’s just, she was a good girl.
At one point in there we had a cat. I should just mention it.
My dad was the dog trainer. My dad was disciplined and he was good at training the dogs and getting them to do their recall and their healing and all those things. He did not like cats and still doesn’t.
At one point, my older brother, who’s a lot older than the rest of us, rescued a kitten that he’d found wrapped in a plastic bag, in a dumpster, something to that effect. And he brought the cat home and we called it Oliver. It had a little half mustache and I think he hit it in the basement for a while.
He was like taking care of this cat sort of on the down low. And then my parents discovered it and they said all he can stay. And so, Ollie was around for a while.
Again, like my memory is hazy. This is some time in my teen years where Ollie was around, even though my dad had said we would never have a cat. The signature move that all he made, this is like my only experience with cats until we have our own, now. Was that all he would occasionally you’d walk down the hallway. And Ollie would run out from wherever he was. He’d be like in a room or something he’d run out and bite your ankle and then run away.
I just remember this little flash of a cat running past and giving you a little bite and then running away. It was like, he’d do a little attack as he walked down the hallway. So that was my only cat experience.
Prada the Illegal Mix
This is a funny pet story. My mom ordered a dog from a breeder. In the East Coast. She wanted a Chihuahua. So, she ordered a Chihuahua.
She gets this dog, this beautiful little kind of grayish Chihuahua, and it’s a puppy. And as it’s growing, its legs are kind of lengthening out. And my mom keeps thinking, gosh, this dog…
Her name was Prada because this was around the Paris Hilton time. And it was like a little, a little bag dog, like little, my mom didn’t carry it in her bag, but that’s the size of dog that it was, you know, intended to be.
Prada the Chihuahua that grew and grew and grew. So, it was like a little Chihuahua body, but it ended up having these stilt legs. And my mom just thought, oh, it’s kind of a funky dog. Like, you know, she’s just a little odd.
And one day my mom got a call. I was, this is when I was in my late teens because I was at college, I think when Prada passed away. This is in my late teens. My mom got a call from an FBI agent who was looking into the breeder.
It turned out that this breeder, it was like in Philadelphia, or something was selling dogs as full bred Chihuahuas. And these toy-sized Dobermans, little, tiny Dobermans, and they weren’t keeping them straight.
And it was kind of a puppy mill situation that from the outside, you would know that, you know, you thought it was reputable, but then she, she gets this call, and they say, you know, tell me about your dog. And she said, well, it’s kind of odd. I mean, it’s, it’s, she’s a great dog. We love her, but she’s, she’s very tall and she’s not kind of what we expected.
And it turns out that they were investigating this breeder for its ill breeding practices, which is a thing it’s a real thing.
So, Prada was kind of a funny dog.
Millie and Mia
And then my younger sisters for Christmas one year were given dog’s. An actual Chihuahua that turned out to be a fullbred Chihuahua. And a mini–Dachshund Millie and Mia and Millie and Mia were so cute.
They were, they kind of grew up as sisters. Millie was a little skittish. Mia was beautiful and really both are cute. They were my mom’s dogs. And so, she took care of them. She didn’t necessarily train them. Neither of them is like super, highly, easily trained dogs, but she wasn’t out there like healing them like my dad would have been with, you know, some of the bigger dogs we had.
Millie and Mia kind of grew up as a little old spinsters. When my sister has left to go to college and stuff, Millie and Mia stayed home. They weren’t ever separated. They grew up and kind of became these like spinster dogs. And they just passed away in the last few years. They were sweet together. You know, they, they were, they were funny little dogs. Lapdogs.
You would sit down and they kind of owned the house. You’d sit down and you’d have one of them on your lap. Not Mia. Millie would hop up on your lap and make herself comfortable, little lap dogs.
Scout
Then when Moqui passed away, these are the long long-term, you know, 15, 13, 14, 15-year-old dogs when they passed away. Moqui passed away, my dad got another little, I think she’s a golden doodle, but she’s, mid-sized her name is Scout and she, yeah. The best dog. And she goes with my dad everywhere.
She goes to the office with them. My dad is a private pilot and likes to fly and Scout will hop up in the plane and, you know, go camping in Idaho with him. They spent a lot of time together. She’s a great dog.
I remember telling my dad around the time that Dave and I were thinking about getting a dog, if you’d want to just, you know, give me Scout, I’ll take her. Because I know that she’s great. So, I’d just like to take her.
Rats, Fish and Other Miscellaneous Pets
So those are the dogs and cat, the cat Oliver. The other pets that we had intermittent were rats. I do not know what my parents were thinking, what my mom was thinking, but at one point we each got a rat to take care of.
My sister’s rat was named Bonzai. My rat was named Sebastian. This was around the time that the Little Mermaid came out originally. Like, the cartoon version. My brother had a rat named Titan after King Titan. And then there was one more, that was our oldest brothers, but we don’t remember what the name was.
I even talked to my sister. We don’t remember. So, there were four rats. And what I remember with the rats was that we would use our duvet covers and make like mazes for them to run through and like get a treat at the end, we had our own little sort of research mazes happening. The rats were fun for a while. I mean, they were also kind of weird, but there you go. We had rats.
At one point, my brother got a tarantula for his birthday one year. It was like a strawberry haired tarantula. And he took it out and was holding it and broke out in hives. It was so, so allergic to the little, tiny rose-colored hairs of the tarantula body.
And so that did not last, he wasn’t able to have the tarantula because he was super allergic to it.
We had a frog on the counter. I was just talking to my sister about this, too. My sister-in-law, the first wife of my oldest brother gave my younger brother a frog for one of his birthdays, this little, tiny aquatic frog.
It’s like a little carnivorous aquatic frog. So, it lived in essentially a fish tank on the counter, and it would eat brine shrimp, frozen brine shrimp that you just keep in the freezer and break off a little bit. My brother named the frog Midget.
It was this teeny tiny little frog. And that frog lived on the counter of my parents’ house for probably over ten years. I am not kidding. It was like just always there, this little, tiny frog.
Once my brother moved away, my mom fed it the brine shrimp. Midget lived on the counter forever. And I didn’t remember this, but my sister and I were just kind of laughing about pets. She said I had a goldfish when I was very little.
I probably was too young to remember her goldfish. She had a goldfish and my older brother wanted to give it a bath. And so, he gave it a warm, sudsy bubble bath. And that was the end of her goldfish. She mentioned she also at another time, how to goldfish test, I don’t know where these goldfish came from.
She had a goldfish that she wanted to change the water on the tank. She recognized the water was getting a little yucky. And so, she poured the water, including the fish down the drain and just didn’t think that she needed to like take the fish out, separate from the water.
So, she just, she was going to change the water and just pour it. The whole thing down the drain, poor little goldfish. Didn’t make it.
I have a family culture of PETS
Well, that’s my introduction to growing up with pets. You can see that I have a long history of family pets. That was just a huge part of my family culture was being pet people, specifically dog people, but there were this little kind of iterations.
I knew going into my adult life that at some point I would have pets. I knew I would have a dog. That was just part of the deal. In fact, I remember telling Dave, I don’t really feel like a full family until we have a dog. That kind of completes it kind of caps off our family. When we first got married, we lived in an apartment that was not pet friendly.
We lived in apartments that weren’t pet friendly for the first about eight years of our marriage. And it wasn’t until we moved into our first home that we owned ourselves, that we had the opportunity to then have a dog. And my dad connected me to a rancher that was an old friend of his, a man who owns a ranch in Mesa, Arizona, a cattle ranch. He raises Australian shepherds to work on his ranch. And so, after I had my Milo and Eliot and Plum was about two, we got Quincy.
Choosing to Get A Dog
I had originally decided I didn’t want to have pets until my kids were all in school. And then I listened to a podcast episode, you know, 10 years ago, I listened to a podcast. No, I guess six years ago, I listened to a podcast episode about how, at some point your teenagers stop wanting to hang out with you.
And like, I knew that in like a very nebulous way, but my kids were all young and really loved spending time with me. In fact, that was basically all that they did. And it sorts of hit me that the best time for us to add a dog to our family was when my kids were young enough that they were home often enough to really have a relationship with it and to enjoy it.
It didn’t make sense to me to get a dog. Well, I had thought I’ll get one when Plum goes to school full-time so that I have more time to take care of the dog. And then I had this mindset shift where I want my kids to have a full interaction with this puppy as well. So, I’m going to get a dog as soon as Plum is a little bit more independent.
Quincy Jean Aussie Queen
So, I think around the time she was too, that we weren’t nursing anymore. She could walk, she was starting to talk. She was still in diapers for another little while, but we decided to get our dog who we named Quincy. She’s a Red Merle, Australian Shepherd. We drove to Arizona and picked her up at the cattle ranch and then drove home.
We road tripped home. We went camping on the way home. And so, her, our first sort of interaction with her was in the outdoors. And she has been such a wonderful outdoors dog. Uh, we take her camping with us. We take her hiking with us, and she’s been our companion for the last year. Just turned six in March.
I think I sort of assumed that Quincy would be like our dog for a while you know, for, until the end of her life. And just like be our family dog. She’s been so fun and she’s super velcroed to me. She loves me. I am her mom. She wants to spend all her time with me.
I’m going to kind of fade for a second into some of the benefits and challenges of pet ownership as an adult. I don’t think I realized the benefits or the challenges when we embarked on our, our own pet ownership pathway. The first year with Quincy was really, wonderful, and really, hard. She was a great dog. Aussies are highly intelligent, easy to train. So, she potty trained easily. She. You know, trained well with walking in with recall.
And, and she is really dedicated and loyal, very friendly with our kids, easy to get along with. And she also had a ton of energy. And so, she would busy herself with chewing. I think she chewed up three or four pairs of my favorite leather shoes during her for six months. That’s my bad, right. For like having them out.
I’m going to tell you a tip. One of the things I think I didn’t realize before owning pets was that their training is a little like we think we’re training them, but we’re training ourselves. Setting especially dogs up for success by not having things out that they can get into is a lot of the training, keeping them in the environment in a situation where they are in control.
That’s a lot of the training. We were crate training her and when she would be out and known as watching her, that’s when she’d get in trouble as a youngster. After about one, that chewing stopped. After about two, I feel like she had a little bit more chill.
Now I take her to my office with me. She’ll lay down under my desk. She’s a great road tripper, I think taking her camping and hiking a lot when she was young, just really built that into her.
Bed Head the Gateway Guinea Pig
She’s a great road tripper and she’s been fun. Oh, I wanted to back up a little bit and tell you kind of our journey. I told you a little bit about when we decided to get Quincy, but we also decided to do a bit of a slow roll into it.
So, we fostered a dog for a few months before we decided to get a dog ourselves. We fostered a Greyhound named Anya with the gray hound rescue in Austin, Texas, and she was a phenomenal dog. She was wonderful.
We thought a couple of times, maybe we should just rescue her. Maybe we should just keep her because they were looking for an owner for, and just the profile of the Greyhound didn’t match the profile of what we hoped for in our own dog.
As far as being able to be hardy outdoors, greyhounds are a little bit more fragile as far as weather and their skin is thin because they have short coats and so camping and, you know, kind of rugged outdoors is not the best environment for a Greyhound.
We had such a wonderful time fostering on yet that it gave us some confidence in terms of becoming dog owners ourselves. I remember this conversation, we were looking at the pet store and I was kind of tiding Milo, especially it was really interested in having a pet and I was tiding him over by taking him to the pet store, to just look at the animals, going to the SPCA, to just like hold cats and play with dogs, just kind of volunteering and staying on the fringes of it, to kind of tide him over.
And we sort of settled into the idea of maybe we should get a Guinea pig. It’d be fun to have a Guinea pig. So, we found a Guinea pig that we thought was so cute just at the pet store, near our house. It was named Bedhead. I mean, we named it bedhead because I had these swirly tufts of hair and I discussed it with Dave.
Maybe we should get a Guinea pig. And I was doing research about Guinea pig care and what’s involved and what they eat, and I’d never owned a Guinea pig. So, I didn’t know. And as I was looking into it, I realized that Guinea pigs can live like 10 to 12 years. They need, you know, daily food and water. They need exercise, they need stimulation.
You must clean out there, their tank, you know, their environment where they’re living their little cage. And I thought, gosh, caring for a Guinea pig seems sort of like caring for a dog, all the investment of time and energy and what you would consider, maybe a financial and, um, you know, resource obstacles are time commitment, daily feeding, watering, cleaning, those sorts of things.
Those are not that much less with a Guinea pig than they are with a dog. And yet you can, you know, in my head having grown up with dogs, I thought, you can do so much more with a dog. So, our Guinea pig research was the gateway drug to deciding, to get Quincy.
I recognized that we wanted a dog. There was no reason to tiptoe into dog ownership with a Guinea pig. We should just like all the same resources applied to let’s just go for getting a dog. So, we got, we got Quincy.
Backyard Chickens
Then a few years later got chickens. So, our chickens are now three-years-old. We initially started with Mozzarella, Blackberry, Goldie Hen, and Feathers.
After about one-year sweet Feathers was attacked by a Hawk in our neighborhood when she was out free ranging. And so, we buried Feathers. The next season, we also got Gilda Gold, Marvel and Oreo McFlurry. So, we have a flock of six right now. They’re wonderful and lovely.
Chickens are so easy to take care of. They are starting to lay again. Now that it’s warmer, my chickens are laying every day. I get six beautiful backyard, organic free range, pasture raised hen eggs. Every day. They’re hilarious to watch. Some of them are friendlier than others.
Just like with, you know, I guess any pet, you know, they’re not domesticated animals, but the more time you spend with them, the more likely they are to be friendly.
Those that we held and kind of have that we can hand feed them snacks and they’ll come on over, they shop around the yard, they dig, they take dirt baths. They’re fun. And we introduced Quincy to them slowly enough.
We trained her that they were not that it was not okay to chase them. It was not okay to mouth them. No biting, no playing with them like toys. Quincy and the chickens get along really, well, which was wonderful.
She does herd them on occasion, especially when I prompt her to like at the end of the day. And that has ended up being kind of a great benefit.
Pandemic Kittens!!
You’ll recall if you’ve a long time listening to the podcast that during the pandemic about a year ago, a little over a year ago, I talked about getting a cat.
Again, this was kind of brought on by the pandemic, where everyone just wanted to cuddle with something furry to kind of help with the loneliness and the emotional distraction of the pandemic itself.
I’ve also kind of liked the idea of cats. I have some good friends that have cats that are cat people. So, I mentioned it on the show and was reached out to by one of the leaders of the local city animals’ shelters. She so kindly connected me to the foster of a brand-new litter of little gray floofy kittens.
We met them when they were like a week old, and that was the end of the story. You hold a tiny, tiny kitten that doesn’t yet have a home. And that was it. We decided we were going to get one. We were going to get to a sibling pair.
Simon and Olive came to live with us a few weeks later. We were able to meet with them with the foster several times, just so wonderful. I have been shocked by how fun it is to have cats.
We really lucked out too. Our cats big. They’re long haired, both of which are things that I don’t think I would have chosen particularly, but I also didn’t know because they were being rescued and I didn’t, you know, I had an idea of the mom.
Simon is about 12 pounds. He’s big. Olive is nine and a half to 10 pounds. They’re long-haired in the research I’ve done. It looks like they may be a little bit Maine Coon. They might have a little bit of Nebulung, which is like a kind of like a Norwegian forest cat breed. I haven’t done a DNA test on them.
They are very kind, they’re very gentle. They are open to human and dog interaction. They don’t necessarily seek it out except for Olive, who likes to lay on my keyboard when I’m typing, and she likes to sleep with me.
She’ll come cuddle up on my side to sleep. Last night, Simon slept with me as well. He’s, he’s a little more aloof. So, he does his own thing other than feeding them and brushing them on occasion.
They take care of themselves in such a beautiful way. Cats are much lower maintenance than dogs as far as daily care. They can exercise themselves. We play with them, but they can exercise themselves.
Especially now that we’re in a little bit bigger house, they have a little bit more run room and having two of them, they play with each other, they interact with each other, they tackle each other. They’re so cute and fun and cuddly and lovely.
Otis the Neighborhood Puppy
I think I’ve shared the story of how Otis came to be part of our family. About six months ago, a neighbor across the street had an unexpected. Her dog had an unexpected encounter with another, not yet neutered, dog. So young Australian shepherd female had, was scheduled for her appointment, and had an accidental encounter with another non-neutered male.
Hence, puppies arrived at my neighbor’s house.
Of the seven puppies, six of them stayed in the neighborhood. All up and down our block families opened their doors to these sweet puppies.
Milo is good friends with the sign of this neighboring family. He spent so much time over there helping with the puppies when they were tiny and feeding them, and we took turns letting them out.
I helped with some of the decisions around them. Otis came home when he was old enough, just right after Christmas.
Otis is technically Milo’s dog. He is created in Milo’s room and Milo is on paper, in charge of his feeding, his walking, his brushing, all his care, his training.
Milo did all his puppy classes as the handler. And like I mentioned at the top of the show, I was up at 5:20 this morning letting Otis out because I think that he didn’t go out right before bed last night. So, he needed to go to the bathroom this morning early. He’s still very much in that puppy phase of learning.
He’s an adolescent puppy right now. Things are tricky and he’s so wonderful and so cute and so fun. He is still learning his manners.
He still jumps a little bit. He still chews a little bit. He’s luckily potty trained completely now, which is fantastic. He’s still getting the rhythm of being in the crate at night, even though he’s been doing that since he was young, if he needs to go to the bathroom, he will whine.
Sometimes that doesn’t align with when we’d like to be up. So, here we are.
We have a six-year-old Quincy, three-year-old chickens, a little over one-year-old Simon and Olive, and six-month-old Otis.
We have a house full of animals. Full of creatures.
On one hand require so much care, attention, financial support, resources, food, love, and exercise. And on the other hand, give so much loyalty care, compassion, rhythm, systems and benefit to our family.
I also need to just do a quick aside for Kanga. RIP Kanga, who was a fish who was given to Plum right after we moved here to Richmond.
So about five years ago. On her fourth birthday Plum was given a fish and it was such a kind gift then just a few weeks later, Plum was convinced that the fish was sick. So, to help her, she gave her some essential oils, some doTERRA essential oils, which is what we, you know, sometimes give our kids when they’re sick.
And unfortunately, OnGuard essential oil does not help a fish.
And so, Kanga didn’t survive. The healing treatment of the four-year-old sweet Kanga was put to rest. And we have decided that fish are no longer part of our animal repertoire at home
The Benefits of Pet Ownership
Now that I’ve told you more than you ever needed to know about my own personal history with pets, both growing up and over the last 15 years of marriage. The last seven years, I guess, or six years, since we added our first pet to our own family.
Let me tell you about some of the benefits research-based benefits of owning pets.
There are a lot of benefits to caring for an animal companion, and it goes back into like the ancient times that humans sought out animals as companions sometimes for security, sometimes for simple companionship, sometimes animals were even like worshiped as spiritual creatures. It was good luck or good omen to have them around.
Lower Stress + Decreased Loneliness
Some of the current research around pet ownership, specifically dogs and cats talks about how having an animal around that you’re caring for can lower your stress lowers your cortisol level in your blood. It can decrease loneliness, increase your feelings of social support and increase your mood.
Walking A Dog Increases Your Physical Activity
Dogs have strong research around increasing your physical activity. And of course, this only happens if you take your dog on walks.
I remember talking to Dave as we were deciding whether to get a dog that I said, I really want to go on a walk every day and I don’t do it. If we get a dog, I will have this other sort of factor that pushes me out the door daily for my walk.
I can look back and see how that’s been so beneficial that taking Quincy and now Quincy and Otis on daily, sometimes twice or three times daily walks has dramatically increased my physical activity.
Increased Mindfulness
Pets can increase your mindfulness because they aren’t planners. Because they are always living in the moment, being able to watch, observe and acknowledge the thoughtfulness that goes into the reactions of animals can be interesting and can increase your mindfulness.
Sometimes I’ll sit and watch the way that my cats watch the birds through the window. The other day, Simon was laid out on a chair. I had turned the fire on because it was rainy outside, and he sprawled himself out on a chair and went to sleep and just took up the whole seat and had not a care in the world.
Just looking at him how relaxed he was in this afternoon reminded me that we don’t have to like the race that we think of as life is not inherently a hustle. I can choose to slow down. We can choose to be more present than we can choose to enjoy stretching out and taking a nap in an afternoon if we want.
Caring for Animals Creates Routines
The other thing that I think has been hugely beneficial and research shows this as well, is that having animals to care for creates a routine, because we’re much more likely to follow the steps in a system to care for someone else or something else.
That system that an animal provides as far as waking up and letting out and going on a walk and feeding and bringing back inside and playing with, and then putting in the crate and all those different things, that system. Can increase our ability to maintain a routine and to create and maintain habits that are beneficial in our own life.
Animals Can Decrease Allergies
There’s also great research around allergies and pets for kids that at the exposure to pet dander young can increase their resistance to allergic reactions older, of course, right off the bat. If you have allergies to different types of pets in your home, it makes sense to not trigger those. Don’t have cats if you’re alerted cats. Or look for a anti or hypoallergenic option.
There are so many wonderful benefits to having and maintaining and loving on animals as part of your family as part of your daily routine. And I’m so glad that I am sharing these and that I’m reminded, I’m like reminding myself as I talk through these.
Having a new puppy has been challenging and I just am remembering how wonderful it is and the benefits for me and for Dave and for the kids. And even for the other animals to have those relationships, to have those benefits of pets in our life, there are also definitely challenges. And so, I wanted to just talk briefly about some of the challenges.
Some Challenges of Pet Ownership
Chewing and Chaos
I’ve mentioned the chewing when it comes to dogs. Also, there is some chaos of just having lots of creatures to take care of like, not only my three kids, but also my two dogs, my two cats and my six chickens. That’s a lot of life to be aware of a lot of needs to meet. And while I am balancing meeting my own needs and helping each of them. You know, each of the humans in my home learn to be independent and to learn how to meet some of their own needs as well.
These animals, they don’t get to a point where they meet all their own needs. They’re not out hunting for food, they’re not changing their own litter box. And so, understanding that there’s this element of responsibility of caring for creatures, that can be an obstacle. It can be a challenge.
Pet Sitters for Traveling
When we go out of town, we no longer just drop everything and go, we must make sure that we have pet sitters arranged. I wanted to mention a resource for that, that I have found helpful. There is an app called Rover and we’ve been using Rover for about four years, maybe five, since we moved to Richmond.
On the app, you can search by location. So, you can find pet sitters that are near you, and they’ll have all different types of qualifications. They’ll have reviews, they’ll have what animals they want to watch for and what services they provide. So, you can do a drop-in visit where someone will come check on an animal and feed. You can do walks. You can do in-home pet sitting.
This last time, when we were in Mexico for spring break, we hired a pet sitter through Rover to come live in our house, do house sitting and pet sitting for all of the animals at once for the five or six days that we were gone. In the past, we have had, well, before we had the cats, we had just the dogs taken care of we’d have drop-in visits for the dogs.
Often I would take when it was just Quincy, we would take Quincy to be dog sat at another family’s home. And we found these families through Rover. We could see their reviews; we could see what other dogs they had because Quincy does well with other dogs. We could take her and leave her for a week with a family.
So rather than boarding her, where she was kenneled or where she was with like 50 dogs, she was able to live in a home environment with a pet sitter family, and we felt more comfortable with that.
I have a referral option with Rover. So, if you’re interested in trying it, if you’re already a pet owner for dogs or cats, if you want to give over a try, there is a $20 credit that you can get.
I’ll put it in the show notes so that your first time you’ll get $20 off whatever the services you choose. And I highly recommend looking up what sitters are available. You can heart them; you can favorite them. You can look up who you’ve used before and, and rebook.
That’s been just my favorite go-to pet sitter service because it’s kind of like Uber for pet sitters. I do like to, to book people a week or two in advance and around the holidays, even further, it has been helpful to have kind of an on-demand pet sitting service through my phone. So that’s Rover and I will have a link for that referral in the show notes if you’re interested in giving it a try.
Financial + Emotional Cost
The financial cost of caring for other creatures can be high. So, we have, you know, like our monthly human food cost and then our monthly animal food cost, which has increased as the quantity of animals in our household has increased. We have the emotional toll of having pets that are susceptible to illness and injury just the way that humans can be.
Otis was just a little bit sick. He was on medication for a week to do away with an infection. Of course, we had, we had a raccoon attack years ago with the chickens and while they all were w, they all lived through it, it was kind of emotionally traumatic to have that attack.
I took one of the chickens to the vet, which is kind of silly. This is not something a farmer would do if you had 40 chickens, but we just had the four at the time. And I took one of them to the vet to have a gash looked at and gave her antibiotics for a week. When feathers passed away, due to this Hawk attack that was emotionally traumatic for us and for the kids, you know, to lose an animal.
I’ve been reading Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown. And in one of the chapters she talks about about pet ownership and about losing a beloved pet and how that can cause as much emotional trauma as losing a good friend. I mean, it feels like a member of the family, the, especially the longer that you have these pets that incorporate themselves into your lives deeply. When you’re signing up for pet ownership and for this love and companionship, you’re also signing up for the emotional grief and trauma that comes when, when they’re ill or when their time has come. So those are some of the obstacles of pet ownership.
When You Own A Pet, Get Pet Hobbies
Otis did puppy training classes with Milo and Quincy has been doing some agility training classes with me and we go once a week to the gym and she’s learning some basic, she’s already done create games.
She knows how to go in and out of the crate well. She’s learning to walk like on a straight line. She’s learning to walk in a circle with me. She’s learning to do some like through the legs type of stuff. I don’t know if she’ll ever get to like tunneling and jumping and those sorts of things, but in the meantime, it’s mostly just mental stimulation and I’ve thought about how, when you have a pet, it can be really great to go into it choosing to believe that when you own a pet that your hobbies in some ways can, and maybe for your own benefit should re revolve in some ways around the animal itself.
Training Quincy in agility and like working on that with her is one of the hobbies that I now have. Going to weekly classes with the dog at teaching them, going to the dog park, going on dog friendly hikes, going on dog friendly vacations, that when you have a dog, the more that you can sort of include them into as many aspects of your life as possible, the more that you enjoy the benefits and reduce the obstacles.
If you don’t just have a dog as like a side note or have a cat as like a side note, but if your hobbies and your culture of your family and your lifestyle and the activities that you choose can circle around and somehow involve those pets as part of the way that you use your time, you maximize the benefits. And you also minimize some of the obstacles.
That obviously doesn’t go as much for like fish and, and gerbils and things like that. But for dogs and cats, which are the most common, maybe even bunnies, you know, like things that if you think about what are the activities that, that this animal enjoys, that we also enjoy, that we can incorporate into our regular life.
Dog-Related Activities and Hobbies are Positive for Me
My daily walks with the dogs are good for me, and they’re good for them. Going to the dog park can be fun. Good for us and good for them. We love a dog park in Short Pump. It’s a nearby suburb where there’s a playground right outside of the fence of the dog park. And so, my kids can go play on the playground and they swing, and they slide, and they jump, and they play.
And I watch the dogs in the dog park, run around and get their energy out and chase other dogs. And I wished that they would recall with tennis balls, but they are alas, not retrievers. They are herders. So, they, they chase the other dogs more than they chased the ball to the Frisbees. That’s fine.
If you have a pet, are you considering pet ownership a lifestyle? I would love to just invite you to consider that how much of your lifestyle revolves around or involves the pet themselves. And are there some activities or some hobbies that you could do where you think that it becomes part of life, not just an aside?
Spending time with your pets in an intimate way that can dramatically increase the, the benefits and decrease the obstacles of pet ownership.
I also think taking some time to really observe and learn from them can be fun. So, like I mentioned, just watching my cats and the way that they think, the way that they watch, the way that they hunt, the way that they play. Even Otis and Quincy, the way they owed us has brought so much enthusiasm for life.
You know, this puppy energy, high, high, high strung puppy energy into our home, but also into his relationship with Quincy, with our older dog. I know that it’s a lot, but I think in our experience to cats has been easier than one. And I think two dogs, if you can afford the extra food cost and have the space for us to dogs has been even easier than one in some ways, because they entertain each other so well, they play well together.
They get along well. And all those things, as far as the routine become even more necessary. So rather than thinking, oh, maybe I’ll take Quincy on a longer walk tomorrow to make up for not taking her on one today. Both dogs need to go out. And so, it’s that extra push to really stick with the routine.
That makes things beneficial for all of us. As I wrap up this somewhat meandering random about pets, I wanted to share a great quote from James Cromwell that says, “Pets are humanizing. They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life.”
I have really appreciated the many opportunities to grow and to learn and, and benefit from welcoming these beloved crazy furry creatures and feathered creatures into my life.
And I appreciate the way that they teach us the way that they allow us to build structure the way that they remind us of our place in the family of things. Our connection, the way that, you know, the cats, really, in some ways we’re a comfort and a rescue during a season when I needed that emotional support.
They continue to be that. The dogs add so much life and love and outdoor adventure to our family culture. The chickens are all things wonderful, a high recommendation for chickens.
Okay. As I wrap up here, I’m going to keep it under an hour. As a wrap up, I wanted to share a couple favorite pet products.
Favorite Pet Products
Rover Pet Sitting App (Get $20 when you try it out!)
I mentioned Rover for pet sitting, which is just really, helpful.
When I rescued the kitchens, the foster mom, Pam showed me her litter box, which is automated. It’s called a Litter Robot and it’s a high-investment litter box. And she said, at some point you may kind of get to get to the, the end of your rope with scooping litter and decide that you want to go in on it, especially for two cats.
And that point came for me about three or four months after, after rescuing them. Did not want to scoop litter anymore. And just automating that with a Litter Robot box was fantastic. It’s expensive. It is an investment, but the reviews are super high and say they last forever. So, we got a Litter Robot, which means I no longer scoop litter at all.
The Litter Robot recognizes when a cat goes in it like it senses the weight. And then when the cat leaves, after it’s done its business, the whole thing rotates and filters, the clean litter from the clumps, the clumps drop into a garbage bag underneath the litter box itself. And then it rotates back so that there’s, it’s just clean, fresh litter.
And it does this multiple times a day. So, every time our cats go in and out of the litter box, their litter is automatically sifted. And then about twice a week, I pull out, I do it on Wednesdays and Sundays. They pull out the. Pull out the garbage bag full of clumps, toss it in the outdoor garbage bag, re you know, on it and push it back in.
And I never think about it again. So, there’s no smell, I guess I’d say very little smell, just around the time that it’s time to empty is when you’re like, oh, yep. Time to empty the litter box. So, the Litter Robot, I just highly recommend, I wish I had a discount code or something for you. I don’t, but I will link it in the show notes.
Something that has changed my life with the pets recently is that I, we have puppy food and dry dog food for Quincy. So, they eat different food because they’re at different stages of life. I have put all the kibble into a snap closed airtight containers, and I got metal scoops like stainless steel bins scoops.
And that has been such a game changer that instead of the food out of the bag or having it just randomly like in a bucket or something. I flipped the top on the airtight pet food storage container. I use the stainless-steel scoop and my dogs both eat measured food. So, Quincy eats one cup of her food and Otis eats two cups.
And the scoop that I got is a one cup scoop. So, I it’s so easy. It’s like a measured scoop. And then I close it up and about every three weeks or so three to four weeks. I need to use the big bag to refill the airtight container there on the floor of my pantry. So, I just opened the pantry flip, open the top, do the scooping and the feeding situation is just phenomenal.
It’s been so much easier, easy to share with someone when their pet sitting easy for any of us to do. I’m usually the pet feeder.
I also really love the refillable water tank. So, because we have so many animals, the cats have a little water fountain that goes on top of their cat tower.
So, cats really like running water. They’re more likely to stay hydrated if there’s a little bit of running water or so they say, so we have this on top of their tower. So, they’re the only ones who have access to it. And then the dogs have a self-fulfilling bowl. So, I fill up it’s about a gallon. Of water and I tip the bottle upside down, it hooks into the base.
And so as they’re drinking and this is going to become a right now, I fill up the tank maybe every two days, two or three days, but as the summer comes and they are, they’re hotter outside, I can see that this is it’s going to be a daily refill, but that’s rather than refilling the bowl several times a day, filling up the big gallon tank just once in the morning, and then having them have access to water all day long is really helpful.
As far as dogs, I really like the idea of training dogs to walk well on leashes. And that usually requires a trainer or a behavior camp, like a training camp classes, and sometimes they still like to pull. And if you have a really strong dog. I have sworn by the easy walk harness for a while, I’ll link them in the show notes.
There is a strap-based harness where the loop is on the front. If the dog pulls they’re essentially like pulling themselves backward. And so, it’s not as easy for them to rip your arm out of the socket if you’re on a walk. So, I’m able to walk both dogs at once, even though Otis is still learning some walking behaviors, slower steadier, healing, walking behaviors, leash walking.
I can walk both dogs when they’re both harnessed and maintain, you know, easy control of both. And so that has been one of my favorite pet things.
Slow Feeders (Kong Wobbler, Bowl Maze)
We have a couple different slow feeders for the dogs that I like. There’s a tipping one, that’s a Kong feeder. That’s what I feed Quincy and every day, and then I just picked up a bowl-based, slow feeder for Otis that I really like already. So, I will link those in the show notes.
I have a cactus scratching post for the cats. That’s in my room, in my, my own bedroom. That is cute and helpful because, so they don’t scratch on my furniture.
I also was highly recommended the Feliway for the cats when he got them.
And it is kind of like a pheromone. So, it’s unscented for humans, but the cats can smell the pheromones and they sense it, and it gives them just an overall sense of wellbeing. And so, it really reduces, especially as we were introducing them to a house that had a big dog in it, it reduces their, um, spraying and scratching and fighting.
And any of those behaviors that can be caused by anxiety, the Feliway, pheromone plugin is helpful. So, I’ll link that in the show notes.
Those are the recommendations that come to mind top of mind.
Conclusion
Thank you for indulging me in sharing some pet stories and pet memories and some of the benefits and obstacles of owning pets.
I welcome your questions as sort of now a somewhat seasoned dog, cat, and chicken owner. I would love to hear if you have any questions about getting started with pet ownership, or if you have any concerns about, I mean, I’m not an expert by any means, but I am open to the conversation. You can leave comments on instagram@livefreemiranda or on the website livefreecreative.co/podcast.
I just want to thank you for tuning in and listening to this and the other episodes of the show. It was fun to just dive in a little bit, to my experience and connection to animals at home. They’re such a big part of life for those of us who have them. And so, I hope that this episode has been fun to listen to.
And just a little bit more candid. And if we’re thinking about getting a pet to, you know, gives you something to think about and consider as you’re getting started. As always, I would love to invite you to subscribe to the show and to leave a written and starred review on iTunes. That dramatically increases the ability for the show to be seen.
And I will get back to you again with another fun episode next week, same time, same place. I hope you have a good one. See you later.
