I love having pets, but it’s not always an enjoyable process.
Regardless of what animals you choose, there are advantages and disadvantages.
My wife loves cats for their relative independence and ease of care, but they misbehave as much as poorly trained dogs. They like to climb over everything in the house, often spreading bacteria from floors onto clean kitchen surfaces. If the cat is properly trained to not jump onto everything in the house, you can avoid this problem but many people don’t care. It’s obvious that I’m more of a dog person, but I won’t try to pretend that they are perfect pets compared to cats. If they’re getting on furniture, they’re halfway to the issue I hate with cats, so it’s important to not reward this kind of behavior. Dogs all have a habit of marking their territory with urine at certain ages, especially if they aren’t fixed. My current dog wasn’t easy to house-break, especially when my wife and I weren’t watching him 24 hours a day. One afternoon I could smell urine heavily throughout the entire house. It smelled like it in every room, but I couldn’t find any on the floors. We looked for an hour before my wife saw a tiny yellow stain on the tile floor next to our air conditioner return. Since we live in a condo, the builder thought it would be a good idea to put the returns at floor level. This meant that the dog had the ability to urinate into the air filter with the a/c running, which is exactly what he did. Thankfully these days we don’t have any of those issues with him because he’s completely house-broken.