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.
