How to settle a new cat or dog into your home

The mistake is almost always the same one, and it comes from a good place. The carrier goes down in the middle of the living room, the door swings open, and four people are waiting to say hello. Someone has bought a squeaky toy. Someone else wants a photo. The animal, who has spent the morning in a car after weeks in a shelter, is expected to be delighted about all of it.

Most of what makes the first two weeks go well is subtraction. A smaller space, fewer people, a duller schedule, and considerably less of you than you would like. The goal is not to make a new animal happy on day one. It is to make the house predictable enough that they can work out on their own that it is safe, which is something they do on their own clock and cannot be talked into.

Set up one room before the carrier comes through the door

Pick a room with a door that closes and no way out of it — a spare bedroom, a home office, a bathroom if that is what you have. This is base camp, not a punishment. A new animal will spend most of the first few days in there and come out into the rest of the house on a schedule they set.

Spread the contents of the room out. Cats in particular will not eat next to a litter box, so if the bowl and the tray share a corner because that corner is convenient, you get a cat who eats badly and toilets somewhere you would rather they did not. Food and water are better a little apart from each other too.

• Somewhere to be invisible: a cardboard box on its side, a crate with a blanket over the back half, the floor of an open wardrobe.
• Food and water in separate bowls, on the far side of the room from the litter box.
• For a cat, an uncovered litter tray big enough to turn around in, filled with whatever litter the shelter or breeder was using.
• For a dog, a crate with the door tied open so it cannot swing shut and startle them.
• One or two toys rather than ten. In week one an empty cardboard box outperforms most of what you can buy.

Do the plant audit before the animal is in the house, because you will not get to it afterward. True lilies, including the daylilies that come in supermarket bouquets, are severely toxic to cats, and that includes the pollen and the water in the vase. If you have one and a cat is arriving, it goes to a friend rather than to a high shelf.

The first evening

Carry the crate into the room, shut the door behind you, open the crate, and then sit on the floor and do nothing in particular. Look at your phone. Do not reach in. Most cats will not come out while they are being watched, which is fine — leave after ten minutes or so and let them do it in private.

Dogs tend to be the reverse. They come out, and then they want to follow you everywhere, including into the bathroom. Let them. Shadowing you on day one is not a behavior problem to be corrected. It becomes one only if you never leave them alone all week, then vanish to the office on Monday.

Take a dog out on a leash before bed, even if the yard is fenced. A frightened dog loose in an unfamiliar yard in the dark is the dog who finds the gap in the fence you did not know was there.

Cats and dogs decompress on different clocks

Cats

A cat who stays under the bed for four days is a normal cat. What matters is not whether they come out while you are in the room but whether food is going down and the litter is being used overnight. Sit in there turned slightly away from them and read something out loud, or take a phone call. You are being furniture with a voice. If you catch their eye, blink slowly and look away first. The first time a new cat approaches you usually happens shortly after you stopped trying to make it happen.

Dogs

Rescue circles pass around a rule of thumb about three days, three weeks and three months: a few days to stop being overwhelmed, a few weeks to learn the routine, a few months to be fully themselves. Plenty of dogs run faster or slower. What it gets right is that the dog you meet in week one is not the dog you will end up with. Quiet, undemanding animals often turn confident and opinionated once they relax, and the household that set no rules because the dog seemed so gentle spends month three unpicking that.

Food, and the temptation to improve it

Feed whatever they were already being fed, in the same amounts, for at least the first week. When you do want to change it, change it slowly — a quarter of the new food mixed in for a few days, then half, then most of it, across a week or so. A new home, a new routine and a new bag of food inside the same forty-eight hours makes it impossible to tell what upset what.

Meals at the same times in the same spot do more for an anxious animal than any particular recipe. If nothing at all gets eaten in the first day, especially by a cat, that is a call to your vet rather than something to wait out.

Where the first two weeks usually go wrong

• The welcome party. Visitors can wait a week. The people who already live in the house are enough new faces for now.
• The whole house at once. Five rooms is not a gift to an animal who has not worked out where anything is.
• Off-leash walks too early. A dog who does not know your voice yet has no particular reason to come back to it.
• Free run of the house at night for a cat who has not found the litter box in daylight.
• Taking a week off for the arrival and then vanishing for a full day on Monday. Practice leaving from day two: two minutes, then ten, then an hour, while it is still unremarkable.

What week two looks like

By the second week you are watching for small, dull signals rather than affection. Eating on schedule. Sleeping stretched out instead of curled tight in a corner. Walking into a room you are already in. A dog who takes his eyes off you long enough to sniff something. A cat who grooms in the open.

That is the point at which the world can get bigger — one more room, a longer walk, a friend who has been instructed to completely ignore the dog for the first twenty minutes. If a big week is followed by a step backward, shrink the world again for a few days. Nothing has been undone. You have found the edge, and now you know roughly where it sits.