15 Safety Tips for Time-Traveling with Your Pets

Last Updated on December 2, 2025 by Michael

You built a time machine.

In your garage.

Using YouTube tutorials and a microwave from 1987.

And now you’re what—gonna leave Mr. Whiskers behind? The same cat who throws an existential crisis when you close the bathroom door? Good luck with that.

1. Pack Enough Treats to Prevent Temporal War

Here’s what happens when you run out of treats in the Jurassic period: Your beagle, the one who cries when his food bowl is only 80% full, will absolutely fight a pterodactyl over half a granola bar. He will lose. The pterodactyl will follow you home. Your HOA doesn’t cover “prehistoric aerial predator damage” and frankly, neither does your homeowner’s insurance.

You know what’s worse? Cheese—regular supermarket cheese—functions as legitimate currency in 47% of recorded human history. This isn’t a fun fact, it’s a warning. Your string cheese could accidentally fund the Spanish Inquisition. Your babybel could start the Hundred Years’ War. That aged gouda in your backpack? Congratulations, you just bought Manhattan from the Lenape. Again.

Pack treats like you’re prepping for nuclear winter, then double it. Your pet’s hunger doesn’t care about the space-time continuum.

2. Temporal Microchips (Your Vet Won’t Help You)

Standard microchips only work in linear time.

Useless.

3. Cats + Historical Figures = Apocalypse

Remember when your cat knocked your coffee onto your laptop, looked you dead in the eye, and knocked your phone off the table too?

Now imagine that energy directed at the fabric of space-time itself.

Cleopatra’s cat invented algebra, uninvented it out of spite, then re-invented it wrong. That’s why math is hard. That’s literally why. Some temporal cop had to fix that mess and frankly they did a terrible job because have you seen calculus? That’s not math, that’s cat revenge.

Your cat will 100% become pope. This has happened four times across different timelines. They’re not even Catholic.

4. Get the Expensive Leashes

The universe processes paradoxes about as well as a dollar store computer processes Cyberpunk 2077.

One temporal paradox—just one—and suddenly hot dogs are classified as sandwiches in every timeline, the Beatles never broke up but only made polka music, and your grandmother is somehow your grandfather’s cousin. Don’t ask. The universe doesn’t know either.

Quantum leashes aren’t a scam. They’re expensive because preventing your labradoodle from becoming his own grandfather requires technology that hasn’t been invented yet. You have to steal it from 2847. The people in 2847 are surprisingly chill about this.

5. Your Dog Needs Latin

“Sit” means nothing to a Roman centurion.

“SEDE” might prevent gladiator practice.

The difference between “VENI” (come) and “VINI” (wine) is exactly how Pompeii happened. Yes, really. Drunk chihuahua, volcanic eruption, direct correlation. Look it up. Actually don’t, it’s been scrubbed from the timeline but the volcano remembers.

6. Every Butterfly Your Dog Doesn’t Catch Ruins Everything

That butterfly in Victorian England that Sparky didn’t catch? We don’t have zippers because of that. We have buttons. Forty-five minutes every morning, buttoning things like some kind of medieval peasant, because your dog couldn’t resist chasing one pretty bug through Hyde Park in 1837.

But that’s nothing compared to what hamsters do. One hamster wheel spinning at the wrong moment in 1743 powered the entire Industrial Revolution two centuries early. Now everything runs on hamster power. Your car? Hamsters. The internet? Hamsters. Nuclear reactors? Believe it or not, hamsters. Nobody knows how to transition to renewable energy because technically, hamsters are renewable.

7. Meeting Points Across Time

McDonald’s exists in every timeline. Yes, even the one where cows evolved thumbs and run the franchise themselves. Yes, their Big Macs are ethically complicated. No, you shouldn’t ask about the special sauce.

Keith Richards also works. He’s just… there. Always. In every timeline. Standing. Possibly immortal. Definitely not human anymore.

8. Historical Costumes Aren’t Optional

Your hairless Sphynx cat in 1692 Salem is a witch-burning speedrun.

Your pug trying to breathe through a plague doctor mask is a different problem with the same terrible outcome.

But honestly? Leonardo da Vinci would probably just draw your naked hamster and call it art. That man drew detailed sketches of his grocery lists. He’s not judging your rodent’s fashion choices.

9. Temporal Midnight Will Ruin Your Week

It’s when the timeline’s digestive system does a hard reset. Your corgi eats one Victorian cucumber sandwich during this window? He’ll burp out the entire Ming Dynasty. The porcelain alone takes three weeks to pass. The dynasty has to be restored from a backup timeline that nobody admits exists.

10. The Universal Pet Translator

Your parrot screaming about crackers means nothing to Babylonians. They think it’s possessed. They’re not entirely wrong.

The app translates everything, but honestly? Making your goldfish’s blubs into eldritch horror screams was a choice. An accurate choice, but still.

11. Document Everything or Lose Your Mind

Day 1: Dog ate the Mona Lisa. The actual painting. No idea how. Day 6: Cat founded religion. Has pope hat now. Day 15: Goldfish created paradox, immediately forgot about it. Crisis averted by goldfish attention span. Day 23: Hamster is Napoleon. Not metaphorically.

You think you’ll remember which timeline is yours. You’re wrong. You’ll come back to seventeen realities where your hamster rules different empires and forget which one has your Netflix password.

12. Temporal Vaccines Your Vet Pretends Don’t Exist

The Dancing Plague of 1518 was real. People danced themselves to death. Your golden retriever will catch it, bring it back, and start a TikTok trend that ends civilization.

Also whatever killed the dinosaurs? It made them stupid first. Really, really stupid. Don’t let your pet be patient zero for Stupid Disease 2: Electric Boogaloo.

13. No Souvenirs. None. Zero.

Baby dinosaurs don’t stay cute. That “stick” from Sherwood Forest is Robin Hood’s entire bow. That “rock” from Chernobyl isn’t from this dimension. Your cat’s “friend” from ancient Egypt is the literal goddess Bastet.

Kevin, put the Holy Grail down. The Knights Templar have a very good lawyer.

14. Insurance Companies Hate This One Weird Timeline

“My hamster accidentally became a deity and started a holy war” isn’t covered under acts of God because technically, your hamster IS the God in question.

15. You Have to Go Back to Your Terrible Timeline

Sure, you found the timeline where dogs live forever and nobody invented Mondays.

Too bad.

Your actual friends are waiting in Timeline A, where your goldfish didn’t become Federal Reserve Chairman and crash the economy with his innovative “food flake standard.”

The Part Nobody Tells You

Every weird thing in history? Some time traveler’s pet did that.

Platypuses? Escaped future pet. The 1920s? Time-traveling parrots taught everyone future slang. The fact that Australia exists? Don’t get me started on what happened when someone brought their emotional support kangaroo to the Pangaea period.

You will mess up history. The only question is whether future historians will say “oh, so THAT’S why the Renaissance was like that” or “and that’s when we banned time travel forever.”

Try not to be the reason we can’t have nice things.

P.S. – Stop trying to take your goldfish to see the Titanic. You know exactly why that’s a bad idea, and it’s not the reason you think.