Are you bothered by stray or unexpected animals getting into your house? Smart doors for a pet can be the solution for you. Going over some of the advantages of a them may help you decide if it’s right for you.
It’s an almost effortless way to avoid all kinds of animals, wildlife, or neighborhood pets from entering your home while keeping your house locked uptight.
It can work in a few different ways:
- Identify your pet using its existing microchip.
- Using a special collar.
- Facial recognition scanner.
Advantages of a smart pet door with other animals
It’s surprising how many stray visitors you can get
From the local wildlife that lives in a surrounding park or reserve, to the hungry neighborhood stray animal. This can be annoying and it can also increase your pet food bill. This can also happen sometimes, without you even realizing it.
According to the ASPCA, 6% of dogs and 27% of cats are found stray. So only out of the stray animals alone, this can indicate that it’s likely that animals would be entering through your pet’s door, especially in certain kinds of neighborhoods.
How do other animals entering my home, affect my pets?
Your pets could be dealing with extra stress from other animals entering your home.
Not only could it induce more stress, but also make them susceptible to a host of infections or viruses. Just like us, your pets can get affected by unwanted visitors.
Here are a few things you can look out for when seeing a stray animal. It may give you a better understanding of what you are dealing with.
A few diseases are known in animals:
- Distemper: Symptoms include high fever, reddened eyes, and a watery discharge from the nose and eyes. The pet becomes lethargic, tired, and eventually anorexia. Persistent coughing, vomiting, and diarrhea may also occur.
- Influenza: Symptoms for this: Coughing, sneezing, variable fever, clear nasal discharge that progresses to thick, yellowish-green mucus. Other ones are: Rapid and difficult breathing, loss of appetite, and lethargy.
- Parvovirus: This is what is displayed with the Parvovirus: Bloody diarrhea (often severe), fever, lethargy, loss of appetite malaise, rapid weight loss, and vomiting.
- Various Parasites: Some of these things will be displayed in the animal: Scooting, vomiting, diarrhea, distended abdomen, weight loss, and occasional coughing.
- Fungal Infections: You may observe the following: Musty odors, thickened and/or darkly pigmented skin. Flaky, scaly, or crusty skin. Itching and redness. Chronic or recurrent ear infections.
- Heartworms: Symptoms of this: Soft dry coughing, inactivity or lethargy, weight loss or anorexia, rapid or difficult breathing, bulging chest, allergic reactions, and the animal may collapse.
What’s the right kind of smart dog door?
Smart dog doors are wonderful for controlling your pet’s curfews. Now you know where your pet is at certain hours.
Your pet can be identified by the door, to allow access to only your pet through it. It can do it through the three most common ways, as mentioned at the beginning of the article.
Most of the electronic doors for dogs have
Here are some brands that provide the three different methods of identification.
- SureFlap Microchip Pet Door (Works with your pet’s microchip)
- High Tech Pet Power Pet Electronic Door (Works with collar)
Typically, smart pet doors are generally powered by batteries. These can roughly last for up to six months.
What is the impact on my health, from stray animals?
Upon doing some reading up on the internet, I realized that our health can be affected too.
There are a few diseases that can be passed on to us if we aren’t careful. So be very careful when handling stray animals. There is a list of potential diseases that are listed on the Medical News Today website.
The other possibility is if you have stray animals sneaking into your home, and you haven’t discovered them yet. Especially if you have young toddlers around that put everything into their mouths.
Will your pet fit through the smart door?
The various models and makes vary in size. Generally, the larger end of the typical pet door is around: 24 inches high by 14 inches wide.
I like the idea in this video.
You can simply take a piece of cardboard and cut the size out so that your pet fits through easily enough. This will be a definite way of knowing whether your pet will fit through any given size.
Are they reliable?
Like anything, you always can get a bad apple. However, the electronics are quite simple and the moving parts are low speed and low torque. So mechanically, it should last for many years, if it’s been designed and built reasonably well.
Electronics are something that should outlast everything else.
You will always receive a warning of some kind if the batteries are starting to run low. This will give you plenty of time to add batteries to your shopping list or pick up some new ones whenever it’s convenient.
If it works with a rechargeable battery, you will be alerted when it’s time for it to be recharged.
So to sum up, these types of pet doors should be quite reliable and continue to be reliable, for at least a few years. If it has a rechargeable battery pack, it may need to be replaced every couple of years.
Some better-quality batteries can obviously last longer.