Picking the Right Floor When you have Pets

Cats and dogs can be expensive enough to look after. There’s the cost of buying them in the first place, the cost of feeding, caring for, buying beds and treats for them, and then there are the more unexpected costs that you don’t want or need to be paying. Particularly in cats, there are certain habits that can affect more than the things that concern them. Furniture, carpets and plant pots often fall victims to the many whims of cat behaviour, and those reasons mean you should think about what kind of floors to install in your home if you have cats, or are thinking about having pets in the foreseeable future.

Smell

Smell can be a big problem with cats, especially when they’re stressed. Carpet is obviously the worst kind of floor in those situations as it will hold any cat smells very well. Hardwood flooring is a good option to prevent anything like that happening. You can still put rugs on the floor if you want something softer in places, but the big difference is that they’re machine washable, so won’t inconvenience you too much if any mishaps occur.

Scratching

This is the opposite of what most people think when it comes to what makes a better floor for pets. This is because people associate cats with scratching wooden furniture, so think they would do the same to the floor, but it’s actually carpets which they scratch more often, as the threads in the carpet make a really useful scratching tool for any active cat. The only problem with cats and wooden floors is the friction. They will often be send flying across the floor if they’re trying to get anywhere fast, but that’s hardly a bad thing from a pet owner’s point of view, as it does look pretty funny.

Mix and Match

While everything above says that wooden floor are better than carpets for an animal-friendly house, and while that is true, it doesn’t mean you can’t have some carpet in your house. A good way to have the best of both worlds is to have areas such as bedrooms which are off limits to the cat, or perhaps the more logical solution is simply to make sure the cat is thoroughly house trained!

There are lots of online blogs on the best kind of environment for cats and other pets to live in that will give you a good idea of what to do, but the most important thing is to consider the behaviour of the cat above anything around it. For cat behavioural advice, try here.