Moving house with a pet: the boxes, the day, and the first nights

Your pet has no idea you are moving. They only see the house dismantling itself around them. Almost everything that goes wrong afterwards — soiling indoors, hiding, night yowling, a dog who will not leave your side — starts as that confusion, and most of it is preventable with three or four unglamorous weeks of preparation.

Start with the boxes, early. Bring a few in weeks ahead and simply leave them out. Feed near them. A cat who has had a fortnight to sit on a box does not panic when forty of them appear. Meanwhile keep feeding times, walk times and sleeping spots exactly as they were until the very last day. If the routine holds, the chaos around it is survivable.

On moving day, the most useful thing you can do is not involve your pet at all. Removals crews prop the front door open, and that is how animals get lost. Board them, leave them with a sitter, or shut them in one emptied room with their bed, water, a litter tray and a sign on the door that says DO NOT OPEN. Give a small meal rather than a full one — motion and stress sit badly on a full stomach. That room is emptied last and unpacked first.

Do the paperwork in the week you sign, not once you arrive: update the microchip registry and the ID tag with the new address and phone number. A chip is only as good as the number attached to it, and an animal who bolts on day one is usually found near the old house by someone with no way to reach you. Register with a vet near the new place before you need one, and ask your old practice to send the records over.

In the new house, unpack their things first and lay them out in the arrangement they know: bed here, bowls there, litter tray in the quietest corner you have. Do not wash the bedding before the move. The smell of the old home is the most useful object you own this week.

Cats need a confinement period, and the people who skip it are the people who regret it. Keep a cat entirely indoors for at least two to three weeks — many behaviourists say four — before any access outside. Then let the first trip out happen before a meal rather than after it, with you standing at the open door, so that coming back in has a point. Cats let out too early do not always come back. They set off for the old address.

Dogs settle faster, but the first nights are loud anyway: pacing, waking at three in the morning, following you into the bathroom. Walk the same routes at the same times and let them sniff for as long as they want — sniffing is how a dog builds a map of a new place. If your dog slept in the kitchen before, put them in the kitchen here, even if you had planned otherwise. Change one thing at a time.

Give it a month. Appetite usually returns within a few days and most animals are recognisably themselves again in three to four weeks. What is not settling-in: a cat who has not eaten for 24 hours, straining in the litter tray with nothing to show for it, or an animal who hides and will not drink. Those are calls to your vet today, not moving nerves.