Here’s why a pet door is a good idea.
If you have a dog, especially a large one, and you don’t have a yard, it’s probably cheaper to purchase a pet door than to take your dog to a groomer. If you do have a large yard, you’ll need to be vigilant about letting the dog out after letting your own cats in because they can tear open the door. If you don’t have a cat, you’ll need to purchase a new door for every new cat you bring into the home. Pet doors aren’t cheap.
In addition to the financial cost, you’ll want to get creative and pay special attention to your home when installing your pet door. As a baby-owning family, we didn’t want to place a random obstacle just because we had one for a cat. Our dogs, cats, and rabbit all get along, so they wouldn’t mind one another’s presence. It’s a relatively small space so a few steps in either direction should be plenty of room.
And in case you were worried, cats don’t go wild when they lose their way inside, but they may be less inclined to use the pet door if they don’t have a piece of paper in the house to lay on and groom themselves. As a result, it’s a good idea to have a pet door that’s magnetic or leads to a piece of paper. For rabbit owners, this is an especially useful feature since rabbits love to play and you don’t want to open a door that has a bunch of pet fur or scraps strewn about.
Once you have your pet door installed, you’ll need to remember to train your animals not to use it on their own. Any kind of animal door, even the one we have, should have one of those rubber bumpers so animals don’t become trapped inside. If you have an older dog, it might need more training than other breeds.
Finally, if you have cats or rabbits that need to go out and come back inside at various times throughout the day, you’ll need to be diligent in keeping the door open and close it behind your animals when you aren’t there. Our rabbit needs to come back inside in the morning and our cats want to come inside for food or water several times throughout the day. That can be challenging when you’re on a trip to another city or you aren’t home to close the door when your animals leave. You’ll need to make sure you’re home to let the animals back in because they’ll know when they aren’t on the leash or inside with you.
Now that you have a pet door in your home, you can enjoy the benefits of pet ownership even more. It’s cheaper to buy food and care for your pets than you’d pay to take them to the groomer, but you can also feel like you’re doing something to protect the animals if you let them go into a yard and if you let them out at designated times of the day.
You can build a cat door if you need more input. If you want to modify it, you can place it in different places in the house or place it under different doors so your pets can go in different directions.
