Having a pet mentioned in a blurb or on a cover often makes me take a second look at a book. I’m a huge animal fan, and I also love what pets can do for a story. They add warmth, and a chance for softness from our main characters, and even more, they add humor and emotion and unpredictability. Or at least they should.

My favorite stories have pets with personality, and behavior that isn’t all sweetness and light. I’m sure my preference comes in part from having worked around animals a lot over the years, from stints in veterinary clinics to riding camp jobs to caretaking lab rats to a summer as herd manager on a dairy farm, milking 45 Holsteins (back in the day when a farmer could actually make a living with 45 cows.) In all that time, I never met a perfect pet. Many wonderful ones, absolutely, but poop happens. Also sheddy fur, scary escapes, the occasional chewing-up or knocking over, throwing up at exactly the wrong moment, kicking with sharp hooves, taking a dislike to the one person most important to impress. Pets add color to lives, and books.

They’re also scene-stealers, so it’s a balance when writing them in with our main characters. We don’t want the reader to like the dog more than the man, or to feel like the romance is lost in the fur. Right now I’m working on Love and Lint Rollers, a novel with 7 cats and a dog in it. They’re important characters, but I hope the relationship between the cat owner MC and my veterinarian MC centers and grounds the story. We’ll see what readers think.

I like when pets create realistic obstacles. (I almost titled the new book Cats and Complications.) It’s important to me that book characters who own pets are shown taking proper care of them, through the good and the bad. Dogs need to be walked, cats need to be fed, they have food costs and vet care and medications. Sleeping over at someone else’s house isn’t a spur of the moment option if you have a dog waiting at home. I read a book where a couple went to bed together and got up so late that one man’s service dog had peed on the floor. It was presented as a humorous nothing, but to me, not tending to a well-trained dog until it’s forced to soil the house isn’t amusing. How the characters care for their pets matters more to me than how much the pets love them back. (Caring for a cranky critter without complaint is very attractive in a man.)

An interesting point was brought up by a beta reader for my new story. I had a friend refer to a gay man’s pets as his “fur babies.” My beta told me that some LGBTQ folk are sensitive about that term, because of the implication that in a non-traditional relationship, pets are replacing actual children. It was something that would never have occurred to me. I don’t know how universal the sensitivity is, compared to the general use of “fur babies” among pet owners, but it did remind me that when writing about lives different from my own there can be hidden context that I would never have thought of.

A different issue in writing pets for our MCs arises from how much we do love our animals, and feel for them, and care for them. It’s hard to write realistic animals into books without sometimes having something happen to them. Pets get sick, and lost, and hurt. They get old, and sometimes die. There’s a pretty strong rule against killing off the dog in a book, but sometimes when an author’s writing realistic life for their characters, especially books with a longer time span, it happens. I love realism enough to sometimes appreciate reading about the loss of an MC’s pet in a story as an important element of story-building, but I know some readers who want it added to trigger warnings. It definitely should never be an element for cheap angst production. But for me, a death is less of a deal-breaker for a book than an improbably perfect plot-muppet of a pet, or neglecting the pet.

Some authors do pets in books well, and the furry characters add depth and a memory of warmth when I think about the books. Among my favorite M/M pets I’d include Isolde, the dog in Harper Fox’s Tyack & Frayne mysteries, or Clopper, the dog in Amy Lane’s Candy Man, or Dunkyn the corgi in Brandon Witt’s Then the Stars Fell. There are some great cats in M/M, like Murry in Lou Harper’s Dead Man and the Restless Spirits. And many, many more. Given my tendency to put critters into my own stories, I hope that many other readers feel the same way.