Pesach countdown -- 12 Days to Go

Got the vacuum cleaner back today and finally got the first room cleaned up for Pesach. Almost. The bed still needs to be remade, but that's incidental.

This bedroom belongs to one of the college students who is living away from home, so it was relatively easy. Additionally, it allows me to address the question of "what about the animals?". This room was relatively easy because no one has been eating in here and I didn't have to worry too much about finding and getting rid of chametz. Even so, I did find a bit of questionable food stuff:

A bag of candy? Might be okay, might not. But since it's questionable, it gets tossed.

The question of the animals is much more complex. As you can see in the picture of this bedroom, a cat lives here. Two, actually, but the other was hiding. There is cat food, both canned food and a canister of dry food kept in this room and fed to the cats who live here. Is their food chametz-dik? Probably not the canned food, but the dry food contains barley, which is one of the five forbidden grains. So, what to do?

There are a variety of answers to this question. It can be argued that feeding your animals pet foods that contain chametz is a violation of Pesach because you benefit from owning the food. (I would definitely argue that not feeding your animals during Pesach can be detrimental, not only to their health but to yours. But not now.) So some people feed their animals a human-food diet during Pesach -- i.e., their pets eat pretty much the same way they do.

Some Pesach-dik pet foods are now on the market, so that's another option. And pet foods that contain kitniyot (things like corn meal instead of wheat) can be owned and fed to animals even though some Jews avoid eating kitniyot during Pesach.

We have tried a variety of these methods over the years we have shared our lives with companion animals. For most of the past 20 years, however, we have had at least one cat or dog who is eating a special diet. And, after talking with our veterinarians about the potential problems of changing a pet's diet for one week, we no longer make any changes to their diets.

Instead, we change the way in which we feed the animals. We move their food and change the location in which we prepare their food. We also feed them in a different location -- for example, outdoors for the dogs instead of indoors. And, just to add a bit of meaning to these changes, we sell the animals and all their paraphernalia for the 8 days of Pesach. We keep them and theirs in the house unless their new owner should come over and pick them up (hasn't happened so far), and we feed them because not to feed them would be cruel.