About the time I was leaving my 12-year-old Airedale Terrier with a dog-sitter because I was heading to New Zealand for a couple of weeks, The Conversation ran a story about keeping pets cool.
With temperatures regularly in the mid-thirties back home in Queensland, the dog-sitter was hosing down tiles, spraying the dog with water and making him sardine ice-blocks, for which I was eternally grateful.
The article suggests that we humans are trending towards air-conditioning rooms or homes for pets, even leaving air-conditioners on when dogs or cats are home alone.
Australia has one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world, with 63 per cent of households keeping an animal as a pet. That includes well over four million dogs and three million cats, with the majority being kept exclusively or partly indoors.
As the article suggests, trends in pet cooling could change the energy demand for cooling in homes.
In my view, pet-cooling should be an important consideration in energy-efficient housing design, and pet-owners living in energy-inefficient homes or with access to poor-quality outdoor environments should be extra-vigilant when temperatures soar.
If you want to look for alternatives to cranking up the air-conditioning and blowing out your energy bill, you might like to follow up on some of the tips in the article. Follow this link from Elite Agent.
Media contact:
Lyn Cox,
RE/MAX Australia Public Relations
M. +61 418 793 096;
E. lcox@remax.com.au