What your pets do, when you’re not home

What do our furry friends actually do when we’re not home? Are they bored and do they wait sadly in their kennels until they can hear us coming back? We know it’s not always like that and not only thanks to modern technologies, home cameras and computers and sometimes, we are quite surprised. Especially when we come back and find out that our furniture has been moved and the whole interior is “improved”. Guilty expressions then say everything.

This is also the topic of my favourite film called “The Secret Life of Pets” that actually inspired me to write this article. As a proper American blockbuster, the film has a thrilling plot about a lost and found dog, terrier Max, and his friends. However, besides various crazy things the main characters do at home, it does not tell us much about the real secret life of our pets.

Nevertheless, the film started an interesting discussion. We started thinking again if all romping the results of which we get to see later is really so funny or if it is a manifestation of separation anxiety. Not long after the film was in cinemas, a YouTube video called “What my dog does when I leave” went viral. It had one million views in a moment.

The video received a lot of attention probably because of our interest in the secret life of our companions and which was even supported in us by the mentioned new film. A three-minute-long recording is from a GoPro cam which is attached to the dog’s body and it shows how the dog stays in his master’s bed and waits for his arrival after a while of running around the house and howling.

The discussion which followed as a reply to it mainly abroad was maybe a bit too emotional and it was all about the question if it is good to let dogs home alone and how to proceed when an animal reacts badly to a short-term  (You can read about separation anxiety and how to react to it in a separate article.)

Also, a few studies from abroad dealt with the topic of what pets do when they are home alone. They confirmed that the daily routine of your pet partially corresponds to its natural cycle it would have as a best of prey in wild nature. An animal needs some activity it can do while waiting for its master instead of hunting (our pets like transplanting plants and teasing paper :)). After hunting, there’s a calm stage, i.e. sleeping.

It looks like our pets’ life will always be at least a partial secret. And it is really a topic which raises a lot of other questions, is passionately discussed and people get emotional about it. The thought I got after this film and viral video is that instead of becoming detectives we should become the best pet owners ever and try to spend as much time with our loves as possible. And that’s why we got them in the first place.

For the end, to make it funny, I picked a few photos that capture our furry friends when “hunting” :).