Barack Obama has already made one very good decision, early in his term. He has chosen a puppy for his children instead of a cat.
Dog Care:
Open the door let the dog out. The dog does her business and you let her back in. If you live in a city it may be a little more complicated. Go outside with the dog, Dog pees, dog poops. You pick up the poop, throw it in the trash. Job done!
Sure most dogs shed. Vacuum the floor and your pet clean-up is done! It is not my fault if you didn’t train your dog to stay off the furniture. Even if you have dog sofas and chairs your clean up is pretty simple. You can vacuum those while you are doing the floor.
Unless the dog is very good and very lucky, it will get sick occasionally. Then you may find yourself spending a lot of time cleaning up dog messes on the floor, or vigilantly watching your dog hoping to swoop it outdoors to prevent the next mess. Usually though, dogs, even when they are sick, want to go outside. If the dog is old, or you are such a deep sleeper that she can’t wake you up, you may find yourself setting an alarm every few hours to let her out. Soon the sick phase will pass and you will be back to the easy life.
Cat Care:
If you have a dog and are considering a cat, rejoice that dog care requires so little of your time because you will spend hours a day cleaning up after your cat. Basically a cat is like a sick dog that never gets well. There are hairballs, and poop – when he just couldn’t be bothered to walk to his litter box to make a deposit. Of course with a cat it is not confined to the floor, the messes will be on your furniture, window sills and counters too! I am very sorry if your cat pees outside the box. I have not had that pleasure yet, but I’ve read that it is not uncommon, especially with male cats.
The litter box: Apparently most cats, unlike most dogs, cannot be trained to use bladder and bowel control so they need to have an accessible toilet at all times. Unless you enjoy having your house smell like cat waste, which is more odoriferous than an equal volume of dog waste, you will need to clean the litter box at least once a day. Of course this is more complicated and messy than picking up and disposing of dog waste and puts you in unprotected proximity to cat waste from which you can contract toxoplasmosis. It is likely if your house has more than one room, that you will have more than one litter box, so your cat will not feel he has to to walk “too far” to poop and pee.
You guessed it! Cats shed too…a lot!! Hope you don’t have hobbies because this is going to take ALL weekend. Vacuuming the floor is just the start. Actually, if you are smart you will vacuum at the end because you are likely to dump more cat hair on the floor while you are cleaning the counters, shelves, window sills, basically every nook and cranny in your home, some of which are inaccessible to humans without a ladder or moving furniture. I suggest you spend Sunday cleaning all horizontal surfaces and vacuuming because on Saturday you will want to pick cat hair off all the vertical surfaces your cat rubs on. The more difficult it is to clean, the more likely the cat will rub on it. Hopefully you will not also have to repair furniture and door moldings that have become his favorite scratching posts.
We can all be thankful that our next president is wise enough to choose a puppy rather than a kitten. He’ll need to devote all that extra clean-up time to trying to solve the country’s problems.