New Pet Checklist for Dubai: The First Week Home

Most advice about a pet’s first week is written for a house with a garden in a temperate country. A new pet checklist for Dubai needs to be a different list, because three of the genuine risks here do not appear on the standard one at all.

Before he arrives: three things, in this order

Screen the balcony and the windows. This is the single most useful thing you will do, and it needs to happen before the animal is in the flat rather than after the first scare. High-rise falls are among the more common serious injuries we see, particularly in cats and particularly in the first fortnight when an animal is exploring an unfamiliar space. Cats frequently survive a fall from a considerable height and arrive with jaw and chest injuries that are not obvious from outside.

Check the air conditioning, and think about what happens if it fails. A closed apartment in this climate becomes dangerous within hours, not days. If you work long hours, it is worth knowing whether a neighbour or the building has a way in.

Confirm your tenancy actually permits pets. Dull, and animals get returned to shelters over it every year. Fifteen minutes with building management beforehand is worth more than a difficult conversation later.

Days 1 to 3: make his world small

The instinct is to show him the whole flat and introduce him to everyone. Do the opposite. One room, one bed, one litter tray or one toilet spot, one person doing the feeding, and no visitors.

What is normal in these three days: hiding, sleeping a great deal, eating badly or not at all on day one, and loose stools from stress and a change of food. A cat who spends 72 hours behind the sofa and eats at night is behaving exactly as expected.

What is not normal, and should not wait for the settling-in period to end: no food at all for more than 24 hours in a cat, repeated vomiting, blood in the stool, laboured breathing, or an animal who is hard to rouse. Those are same-day appointments.

Food: change nothing yet

Ask what he has been eating and get some of it before he arrives. Changing home and diet on the same day causes most of the upset stomachs we see in new arrivals, and it makes it much harder to tell stress from illness.

If you want to move him onto something different, do it gradually and start after the first week, once you have a baseline for what normal looks like for him.

The first vet visit: book it in week one

Book it even if he seems perfectly healthy — it is not a formality. It is where his real age is established, where the vaccination record gets read honestly, and where the parasites almost every locally rescued animal carries get found and treated.

The consultation is AED 120. Species-specific detail is on our puppy’s first vet visit and kitten’s first vet visit pages, and the full first-month sequence including registration is on our adoption guide.

Toilet training in a Dubai flat

For a puppy, the standard advice is to take him outside frequently. For much of the year here that advice does not work — the ground is too hot during daylight, and he is not finished with his vaccination course anyway.

So plan for an indoor solution first: pads or an artificial grass tray on a balcony, moved gradually toward the door and then outside as the season and the course allow. Trying to follow a British training schedule in July produces a confused puppy and burnt paw pads.

For a kitten, one tray per cat plus one, somewhere quiet and away from the food. Litter tray problems in a new cat are almost always about location, cleanliness or stress rather than defiance.

Other pets at home

Keep them separate for at least the first few days, and longer if the new arrival has not been tested for the infections that pass between cats. That separation is not just about disease — it gives the resident animal time to adjust to the smell of a newcomer before meeting one.

Introductions work better slowly and in short sessions than in one supervised meeting. A resident cat who starts spraying, hiding or refusing the tray after a newcomer arrives is stressed, not badly behaved, and that is worth a consultation rather than waiting out.

Children and a new animal

The first week is not the time to introduce the animal to every child in the family and the neighbours. A new arrival is stressed, and a stressed animal bites or scratches even if it never has before — and a first bad experience sets the tone for years.

The practical rule: short sessions, the child sitting on the floor and the animal choosing to approach rather than the reverse, and no picking up or chasing in the early days. If there is a recently rescued animal and a small child in the same home, ringworm deserves a specific mention — it passes to people, children catch it most often, and any round patch on either of them is worth examining rather than waiting out.

What week one is actually for

Not training, and not showing him off. It is for establishing what normal looks like for this animal — how much he eats, how he sleeps, what his stools look like, how he breathes at rest. That baseline is what lets you notice, in week four or week forty, that something has changed.

Everything else can wait. The vet visit cannot, and neither can the balcony.