The first warning was the sound of plastic scraping slowly across my kitchen floor. This was not the outcome I pictured when I went looking for a large dog auto feeder. Batman had his nose pressed against his new auto…
At exactly 8:30 on Friday morning, my timed dog feeder began dropping kibble into Batman’s bowl. This would have been unremarkable except that I had fed him breakfast about 20 minutes earlier. Batman lifted his head from the kitchen floor…
The baby started crying twelve minutes into my meeting. I do not have a baby. I have Luna. When Luna really commits to a complaint, she produces a sound that lands somewhere between a tiny human in distress and a…
Gravity dog feeders and timed automatic feeders look like cousins in the product aisle: reservoir on top, bowl on the bottom, dinner somewhere in the middle. They are doing different jobs, and the resemblance has launched plenty of wrong purchases.…
Your cat has a talent for placing one small paw on your arm and making your entire heart go soft. That same paw may be inside the food dispenser chute forty minutes later, conducting an unauthorized inspection. This is one…
The bowl was spotless, which made me more complacent than I should have been. I was standing in my neighbor’s kitchen on the first evening of a weekend cat-sitting assignment. Her cat, Princess Boo Boo, had appeared from the hallway,…
The best gadgets for senior dogs do something more interesting than count birthdays. They notice a 2 a.m. hallway tour, warm a favorite nap without turning it into a sauna, or give a beloved gray muzzle a new way to…
The best dog gadgets feel a little bit magical. A tracker turns a heart-stopping “Where did she go?” into a moving dot on a map. A talking button gives your dog a gloriously dramatic new way to request OUTSIDE. A…
Cat people know the uniquely humbling thrill of buying something sophisticated for a family member who once chose the shipping box. Cats do like technology; they simply reserve the right to review it with brutal honesty. A fountain can turn…
Shopping for pet gadgets can make a normal Tuesday look wildly under-engineered. Apparently your cat needs a bathroom with an app, your dog needs a fitness dashboard, and the water bowl has been waiting its whole life for Wi-Fi. Some…