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Bringing a little furkid home is almost as exciting as bringing a baby home – albeit a possibly more perilous and hazardous one, as a puppy can be a lot more mobile, curious, and destructive than a baby. In fact, all the measures that you may take to baby-proof your home, you will want to take to puppy-proof your home as well.


1. Puppy-lock your folding and sliding doors

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Puppies can be the most curious creatures around. You can leave them alone in a room of closed doors thinking that they will not be able to get into any mischief, but boy how wrong you can get. A curious puppy can very quickly learn how to open folding and sliding doors, especially if it involves food or potential play material such as a pail of water. You will want to child lock these doors and keep the child lock on whenever you leave the room.

Many puppy owner have come home to a very wet floor and happy wet puppy, or to find that the food on the dining table has mysteriously disappeared due to the lack of a child lock on their folding or sliding doors. This brings us to our second point…


2. Move the low chairs and tables away from potential play material and food

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You may think that your adorable wee little creature will not be able to jump up onto the chair or coffee table, but you will be very horrified to learn that they can – and they will – especially when it involves them doing something they are not supposed to do.

Many puppy owners have also come home to find food missing from the table only to hear their puppy crunching on a forbidden treat in a corner. Otherwise, they may also find that their puppy managed to jump onto their bedside table and thereafter onto their bed, and left tracks of dirty paw prints all over the covers of their bed.

To avoid coming home to these headaches whenever you leave your puppy at home, move the low chairs and tables away from potential play material and food whenever you go out. 


3. Throw your trash out or get a covered bin

Image source: puppyleaks.com

Puppies, no matter how adorable they look, are Earth’s natural scavengers. They have a level of curiosity that rivals a cat minus the nine lives and will eat anything that they find remotely interesting. While you may think that this is harmless, you are plenty wrong. Did you know that garlic could potentially kill your dog? And even tomatoes.

In fact, there have been many emergency room visits because a puppy ate a piece of thread or string which ended up entangling and tying up their intestines. This is a potentially highly life-threatening situation for the puppy.

On the other hand, if you are lucky, your puppy will just end up regurgitating whatever did not agree with their tummy, and you will find yourself waking up or walking into spots of vomit all over the house.

So keep your trash under wraps, keep them out of reach of your puppy, or just throw them out.


4. Turn off the power to your extensions

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Do you know how some of you like to leave the power to your sockets on? Or the switch to your laptop or mobile phone charger on? Once you get a puppy, you are going to want to turn them off or risk electrocuting your little furkid.

Puppies generally have an obsession with water and with licking the underside of their paws – which by the way can contribute to a really sticky floor – and if they happen to step onto an active power socket with a wet paw, you will be getting an electrocuted and a very shocked and unhappy kid.

So turn off the power to your sockets and extensions when not in use.


5. Block the staircase with a gate

As for what you would do for a baby, block the staircase with a gate for your puppy as well. While these little creatures have four legs, they are too short to reach the next steps yet and tumbling down the stairs in their curiosity is just going to make them phobic of the stairs once the time comes for them to learn how to use the steps.

They are also still rather fragile at this age, so they may just fracture a bone or get injured if they tumble down the steps. Wait until their legs are a little longer and you are around to supervise their learning of the steps, and watch them use the stairs safely at least a couple of times before you remove the gates.


6. Stow your medication and supplements away

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Puppies find the darnedest things appealing, and quite usually one of them could be your medication. Unfortunately, even your mildest medication could affect them quite a bit more differently than it affects you, firstly due to the fact that your medication was created for a human, and secondly, the dosage which could be mild for you will be a lot more severe for a dog.

Take for example a 1000 mg capsule of fish oil. A capsule a day for you may be just fine, but it may be an overdose for your puppy once you take into account his body weight. Hence the importance of keeping your medication and supplements away from your little one.


7. Lock your cleaning supplies away

This is a fairly similar point to the above one of keeping your medication and supplements away from your puppy – except that this could be far more deadly. Your little canine friend may find your cleaning supplies to smell especially delicious, especially if they are scented.

And many a sadly reported case has come out in the news before of a little puppy drinking an entire bottle of bleach or detergent and not surviving to tell the tale.


8. Throw out or give away your toxic plants

Do you know that aesthetic indoor plant you got in order to pretty up the living room? It could potentially be the death of your little puppy as well. There are many plants that are poisonous to dogs, among them the snake plant, aloe vera, sago palm, dumb cane, lime, lemongrass, and Chinese Evergreen – all of which almost every household in Malaysia has.

The names may sound foreign to you, but google them and you will see very familiar-looking images. Almost every household, and even condominiums, has at least one of these plants. But if you are looking to bring home a little furkid, we suggest you throw them out or give them away as they are poisonous to dogs.

Do check out our other guides on How to Make Your Home More Pet Friendly. For more guides like this, check out our Articles page on PropSocial.


(Written by Isabelle, 19 February 2021)

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Very good sharing. haha