Today, most families have pets. There are cats and dogs, of course, but also gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, ferrets, parrots, parakeets, canaries, goldfish, snakes, and really exotic animals such as Vietnamese potbellied pigs, iguanas, or tarantulas. Families in early America didn't have this abundance of choices, but they had plenty of animals around. Farm families had livestock—cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, horses—and sometimes geese and turkeys. Other families had a cow or two, and sometimes a horse for transportation. These animals were not pets, they were working animals used for milking, shearing, hauling, or, in many cases, slaughtering for food.

Sometimes young farm animals—lambs or calves—became favorites (or temporary pets) for kids. For example, the story of "Mary's Little Lamb" is actually about a "cosset lamb"—a baby whose mother died and was raised and hand-fed by its human owners. "Cosset" animals became "imprinted" (as the scientists who study animal behavior say) on humans instead of their own mothers, and followed them around. But we have to remember that relationships with these animals were different for kids in the 1830s. Farm kids often wound up eating animals they knew or even had played with.

On the other hand, dogs and cats were companion animals but were also expected to "earn their keep" by killing mice, rats, squirrels, woodchucks, and other animals that might eat crops. At least one farmer, Thomas W. Ward of Shrewsbury, Mass., listed his family's cats and dogs along with all the other livestock in his farm records.

Before 1830 or so, quite a few New England families let their dogs follow them to church, and sometimes even let them come into their pews! Dogs also often followed their masters to taverns. In paintings and drawings of taverns, we often see dogs curled up on the floor or sleeping under a table. Some men used dogs for hunting as retrievers. There is a tavern sign in the Village collections (you can see it on the wall of the Visitor Center Theatre the next time you visit) that shows a happy-looking "bird dog" with a pheasant in his mouth.

Kids played with their family's dogs and went on walks with them. There are fewer mentions of cats, but there certainly were lots of them around, often inside, where children could play quietly with them. We see quite a few cats and dogs in portraits of children; I think that this was usually done to indicate a child's favorite pet. Most often, boys are shown with dogs and girls with cats. Dogs (and probably most cats) didn't usually sleep in the house, however; they spent most of their time outdoors and slept in the barn or another farm building.