I don’t have a dog, but if I did I would be trying to get it to talk. At They Can Talk there’s a bunch of researchers training dogs to use cheap electronic devices to “say” words. Some dog-owners claim to be able to train their dogs to chain together a string of spoken words into something like a sentence. There’s a whole community of folks trying it, and recordable buttons sold on Amazon, and a good book on it, How Stella Learned to Talk. — KK
Our cats spend a lot of time nestled in their Love’s Cabin Donut Cushions. We have one for each of them, but they often snuggle together in one. It makes me happy to see them sleeping in them. — MF
The weather is getting cooler and I’ve noticed that my cats are seeking warm places around the house to sleep, like spots of sunlight on the floor or our work treadmill after we’ve used it. I bought them an Electric Heated Pet Pad and they love it. It has 9 heat levels and a timer. — MF
The Litter-Robot is what it sounds like – a cat litter box that performs a self clean every time one of my three cats uses it. The manufacturer sent me one to try out, and it’s changed an unpleasant twice-a-day cleaning routine into an easy once-every-two-days task of dumping a tray of litter clumps into the trash. It’s basically a rotating barrel with a screen. Your cat hops in and does her business, and a few minutes after she hops out the barrel slowly rotates, depositing the clumps into a tray, and returning the clean litter to the barrel. It comes with a smartphone app, which I initially thought was ridiculous, but turned out to be useful in alerting me when it’s time to empty the tray. This thing costs $500, which is a crazy amount of money for a litter box. But think of it on a two-year timeframe: is worth a dollar a day to eliminate an unpleasant chore? — MF
One of our cats is getting too old to comfortably hop into our Clevercat litter box, so I needed to get a litterbox with a low profile so she could easily get in and out of. I ended up buying this one (Pet Mate 42036 Arm & Hammer Large Sifting Litter Pan) that has a plastic screen so you can clean the litter without a scoop. It works surprisingly well! – MF