Safe, Dog-Friendly Decorating


Posted on Apr 9, 2008
By Julia Szabo

Let's face it, your home is your dog's castle - and he's accustomed to living like a king. In the old days, monarchs enjoyed primitive personal security in the form of food-testers, body doubles, and the like. These days, our benevolent four-footed rulers have us besotted humans to ensure that nothing in their surroundings could possibly cause them an ounce of harm.  

For little princes and princesses - i.e. young puppies - that means limiting access to certain parts of the house that younguns are not quite grown-up enough to explore without getting into trouble. The best way to designate what I call "no-paw zones" is with a good gate. Alas, certain gates make the off-limits wing of your dog's castle look like some sort of puppy prison. Not the handsome Push Button Gate, whose warm wood and clean, stylish design look right at home in any type of decor, from traditional to modern to country casual.

Dogs love to chew, but ordinary rawhide poses a choking hazard, especially to speed chompers like my brindle girlfriend DD. Instead, treat his or her highness to Veggie Rawhide. This thoroughly modern, dehydrated sweet-potato delight is even more satisfyingly toothsome than old-school rawhide (I know because DD told me so). A big plus: the veggie version looks and smells ever so much more pleasant, if left behind on the sofa, than a piece of dried-up animal skin.  

Finally, if you share your home with a big, powerful, high-energy dog - or, in my case, six big, powerful, high-energy dogs - perhaps a ceramic bowl isn't the best choice for your doggie dinnerware, despite how chic it looks. Having had the pleasure of playing beat-the-clock while cleaning up many a gorgeous ceramic bowl after it's been dashed to shards on the kitchen floor, so that none of my dogs would walk through the mess and injure their paw-pads, I finally learned a valuable aesthetic lesson: Unbreakable dog bowls can be equally good-looking if made of smart, safe, eternally stylish, stainless steel.
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