Teach your dog or cat a few tricks, and your golden years will be better for it.
The movement to improve care for older pets has been going on for some time. But the idea of training pets to help out aging baby boomers is relatively new.
Between 1946 and 1964, 76.4 million baby boomers were born. By this time next year, about a third of them will be between 65 and 70. Millennials will outnumber their predecessors, but boomers were the generation that made cats and dogs part of the family.
Gayle Krigel of Kansas City, Missouri, just turned 65 and doesn’t need help now, but she’s training her dogs so that when the time comes, they’ll be ready. She has two rescues, a very intelligent husky mix named Shammy and a slightly less brilliant St. Bernard mix named Mousse.
After Shammy learns how to fetch the newspaper from the yard during the winter, the dog will start learning to find the remote, which is always lost. And then, because they live in a three-story house, Shammy will learn some “upstairs, downstairs, fetch” commands.