Sensory Landmark

Overview

A sensory landmark is a device or architectural feature that provides an environmental cue that helps pets navigate and understand their surroundings.

Sensory landmarks can engage an animal’s sense of smell, sight, hearing, touch, or taste, or any combination thereof.

Smaller cues can be used throughout the home to help pets know which behaviors are expected of them in different areas, while larger cues can be used outside to help guide lost pets home.

Benefits of a Sensory Landmark

For animals

Pets who understand their role in the household and know what is expected of them feel more secure and less anxious.

Training offers quality time for interaction and communication, fostering a deeper connection between pet and owner, and sensory landmarks improve the quality of that communication between humans and animals by giving them more input that they understand on a primal level.

Successful training creates a feedback loop of positive reinforcement that builds trust and understanding, which helps pets overcome fear and anxiety associated with new situations or commands.

For example, if a pet’s living area within the home needs to be temporarily moved, the more sensory landmarks they have associated with their living area, the easier it will be for them to adapt to a new space if those landmarks are moved to it.

For people with pets

Sensory landmarks help dramatically with training, which benefits people with animals primarily through the reduction of unwanted behaviors and the strengthened bond with their pets that comes from a positive training process.

For people without pets

Sensory landmarks should be built to either be virtually unnoticeable by humans or else have secondary purposes for people whether they have pets or not.

This secondary purpose can simply be to provide sensory input, provided the sights, sounds, and smells are pleasant to humans as well.

Although these may not have as large an effect as with animals, people also benefit from environmental sensory cues, as they help with memory organization and aid in wayfinding, which increases comfort and reduces anxiety.

For rental property owners

With sensory landmarks built into the home, rental property owners will benefit from happier tenants, pets, and maintenance crews due to reduced damage caused by animals.

Tenants who actively train their pets will experience faster and greater success; however, sensory landmarks can work even without any direct input from a human, as animals take in an enormous amount of information from their environment.

For example, if all the spaces in the home designed for primary animal use provide similar sensory cues, and their living needs are provided for in those spaces, many animals will feel more comfortable in these areas and favor them, even without specific training to do so.

How to Build a Sensory Landmark

Indoor Landmarks

Within the home, the most sensory powerful landmarks will be objects the pets interact with, such as their beds, food and water dishes, or litter boxes. However, the environment surrounding these objects can also be built in a purposeful way to communicate to the animal that the space is intended for them.

For example, at Cloud Nine Studios, the cat lofts, bowl basins, and litter closets are all lined with the same blue vinyl flooring, which is used only in these areas and nowhere else in the home. This makes each space a landmark that provides several sensory cues that help cats understand that any place that looks, smells, and feels like that vinyl is safe for them and effectively their exclusive territory.

Outdoor Landmarks

On a smaller scale, nearly any building materials can be used to guide and shape behavior through outdoor landmarks as well. For example, at a home where dogs are used to using a dog run that covered with gravel, then filling a small, remote area in the backyard with that same gravel will give dogs visual, olfactory, auditory, and tactile signals that suggest that is the place to relieve themselves even before any active training is performed.

To provide a strong enough signal that could help pets find their way home, however, sensory landmarks typically need to be fairly large.

In a rural environment, bells and sirens are routinely used to communicate easily with animals over long distances, but in a more densely populated area, auditory landmarks must be tolerated by neighbors, so other sensory cues should be favored.

Since smell is the primary sensory input for navigating the world for both dogs and cats, olfactory cues are particularly effective. Fragrant plants are a simple way to achieve this, both by providing a constant sensory cue as well as by coating the surrounding ground with particulates which stick to animal paws and can help them follow their own trail home.

The be most effective, the scent should be geographically distinct. This can be achieved by using exotic plants that are not found elsewhere locally, or else by using a blend of plants to create a unique compound aroma.

Most household pets have senses of hearing and especially smell that go far beyond human ability or comprehension, which makes building auditory and olfactory landmarks comparatively straightforward. However, visual landmarks require more adaptation to the limitations of animal eyesight.

Visual landmarks intended for cats and dogs should...

• ...be large and simple, as while these animals can recognize basic shapes, their vision is not built for precise detail, especially at long distances.
• ...move or simulate movement, since animal eyes are specialized to detect motion.
• ...use animal-friendly colors, because while humans are trichromats with cones that perceive red, green, and blue wavelengths, most household pets are effectively dichromats, with cats seeing primarily blue and green, and dogs seeing blue and yellow. Since all these creatures can see blue, it is the best color to use for general purposes.
• ...be visible at night, since these animals’ eyes are tuned for picking out details in low-light conditions, visual cues will have a much greater chance of being detected at night, so they should be highly reflective and/or illuminated.

Visual landmarks should be mounted as high as possible to increase visibility. Finally, if an outdoor visual landmark is intended to work with indoor-only animals, then smaller versions should be used indoors as well to familiarize the animals with the landmarks and associate them with their home.

Visual landmarks are less intuitive to humans and require more planning, but they can work over long distances and during inclement weather, so they provide worthwhile advantages. Properly executed, they can blend seamlessly into a building design or serve as artistic decoration.