Living Happily with Your Pet
~ Pet Behavior Library ~
If you're lucky enough to share your life with a pet, you already know that the relationship requires commitment and perseverance. Surely you remember when you last came home to a chewed up pair of slippers (or worse!), a litter box accident, or an eerily quiet house thanks to your dog's "Hairy Houdini" escape act.
Pets provide us with unconditional love and companionship, and even lower our blood pressure. But sometimes they can make our blood boil when they act like, well, animals. Sadly, for too many animals exhibiting behaviors their caregivers can't deal with, their fate is tragic: They are given up, or given up on.
Behavior problems top the list of reasons for pet relinquishment. Thousands of other pets are given up because of lifestyle changes or human health issues. Still others are given up because their caregivers couldn't find animal-friendly rental housing, or because their owners simply had unrealistic expectations about what it meant to care for a pet.
For all these reasons, Beartooth Humane Alliance has compiled a collection of informational sheets to help caregivers meet the many challenges of pet ownership. Our goal: to lower the number of animals relinquished to shelters—or otherwise given up on—because of breaks in the human-animal bond.
