Puppy-proofing your home, room by room

Puppy-proofing is not tidying. It is finding the three or four things in your home that could actually kill, and putting them where a mouth cannot reach. Do it on your hands and knees, at the animal's eye level, room by room. You will see cables, crumbs and bag straps you have walked past for years.

Start in the kitchen and living room. Charging cables at sofa height are the classic electrical burn. Then the linear items: string, ribbon, dental floss, hair ties, tinsel, the thread hanging off a toy. These cause the worst surgeries, because a string can anchor at one end and saw through the intestine as the gut tries to move it along. Use a pedal bin, or keep the bin behind a door. In the food cupboard, the ones that matter most are xylitol (also sold as birch sugar, and found in chewing gum, mints and some peanut butters), chocolate, grapes and raisins, onion and garlic, macadamias, and raw bread dough.

Now the bags. This is the hazard owners genuinely miss. A handbag on the floor is a box of poison at nose height: human painkillers, blister packs of anything, nicotine pouches and vapes, contraceptive pills, iron tablets, sugar-free gum. Visitors are the highest-risk moment, because a guest puts their bag on the floor. Say the rule out loud as they arrive: bags on the hook. Your own medication belongs in a closed cupboard above waist height, not on a bedside table.

Bathroom and laundry: cleaning tablets sitting in the toilet bowl, laundry capsules that look exactly like sweets, razors, cotton buds. Lid down, machine door shut — kittens sleep in warm drums.

Plants and the balcony. True lilies are lethal to cats: the pollen, the leaves, even the vase water. Sago palm, oleander, dieffenbachia, and spring bulbs like daffodil and tulip are worth removing from the house rather than relocating. On the balcony, measure the gaps. If the head fits, the animal fits, and a determined kitten needs under 10 cm. Insect screens do not hold a cat that lunges at a bird; you need proper safety netting or a solid guard. Tie up looped blind cords while you are there.

Then sweep at chew height: shoes, small toy parts, coins, corn cobs, avocado and peach pits, cooked bones, batteries. A button battery is an immediate emergency all by itself.

If something is swallowed, go to a vet or an emergency clinic now. Phone as you leave so they can prepare, and take the packaging or the plant with you. Do not make your pet vomit at home. Salt, hydrogen peroxide and internet remedies cause real injury, and with caustic products, sharp objects or string, vomiting makes the damage worse. Never pull on a string hanging from the mouth or the rear end — you can tear tissue. Your vet will decide whether vomiting should be induced at all, and that decision often has to be made inside the first one to two hours.

Tonight, save two numbers in your phone: your nearest 24-hour clinic, and your region's animal poison line if it has one. Then repeat the floor crawl once a week for the first month. Puppies get taller, and the counter stops being safe.