Pets and holidays

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What do you do with your domestic animals when you go away? If you have a dog you can’t really leave it home alone, so you need to take it to kennels or find a house-sitter. Cats are more self-sufficient but you have to decide whether to take them to a cattery or have a friend come to take care of them so they can stay at home. Other pets can require more creative solutions. We have previously taken our hamster on holiday with us, but this doesn’t really work if we go camping (it gets too hot in the tent) or of course if we were to fly anywhere. Luckily it’s pretty easy to find a friend who has space for a small cage and can just top up food every day or two. A friend takes her guinea pigs with her when she goes away. Fish can be left for a few days with a slow-dissolving food pellet, or you can get an automatic feeder. Otherwise, if you have several animals, or larger ones such as ponies or more unusual ones such as a parrot you are basically relying on friends who can take in your animals or tend to them as necessary. We are now down to just one chicken. Previously we and our chicken-keeping friends would take turns caring for each other’s birds, but now we all have children at school we all want to go away at the same times! Our neighbour and her little daughter would be happy to call in and tend to her, but even the most diligent neighbour couldn’t really spend more than 15 minutes or so chatting to a chicken! So she would be shut in her run 24 hours a day with not much to do and no interesting company. So when we went away for ten days I decided we would take Violet with us and see how we got on. We would be staying at my place anyway which has some outbuildings. So we popped Violet in a crate and carefully arranged our bags around her in the car. When we arrived at our destination it was going dark. Daytime birds like chickens pretty much ‘switch off’ as soon as the lights go out so we found her some space in the woodshed, supplied food and water, and turned the crate on end and put some hay in the bottom as a make-shift nest box in case she needed to lay an egg. Next day she stayed inside for a while, but I couldn’t keep her in there all the time as it wasn’t all that light. So I opened the door so she could join us as we did some work outdoors. She settled in as though it was the most natural thing in the world, pottering about with us in the garden, then to my surprise she made her own way back to the shed and laid an egg before rejoining us. I confess I hadn’t really expected that, once she was out I thought she might just find a place under a bush or something, but she obviously understood my intention and recognised the shed as her holiday home and the crate as the nesting place. For the rest of our holiday she basically hung around with us or pottered about outside. If we went for an outing somewhere we had to shut her in, feeling very mean, but we were around for at least part of every day so she got plenty of freedom, and I think she had a great time! Have you taken your animals on holiday with you? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.