16 Pets Who Ride Along Everywhere, Including a Beagle at a Job Interview, a Cat at the Bank, and a Dachshund at the Hospital

Some pets refuse to be left behind, and their people quietly rearrange whole lives around a passenger seat. In the University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging, which surveyed 2,051 adults aged 50 to 80, nearly 9 in 10 pet owners reported that their animals help them enjoy life and feel loved. That kind of happiness travels well.

These 16 real stories of pets, empathy and unlikely friendships show what happens when an animal rides along: a beagle mix at a job interview, a dachshund in a stroller outside an ICU, and a mother-in-law who wouldn’t take off her coat. Sometimes the passenger changes the driver.

• My 84-year-old grandma takes her 17-year-old cat everywhere in the basket of her mobility scooter: the pharmacy, the library, bingo night.
  At the bank, a new teller asked her to leave the cat outside. Grandma didn’t argue. She just asked for a withdrawal form. She was going to close her account.
  The branch manager came running out of his office. Turns out he’s a cat person. Two years later, Grandma’s cat still rides into the bank every Friday, and the tellers keep a jar of cat treats behind the counter just for him.
  Grandma says that at 84, she’s earned the wisdom to know when to make a fuss and when to just pick up a pen. Of all the pets in our family, Biscuit is the only one with his own bank teller.

This is our passenger pet.

• My grandpa’s 13-year-old dachshund, Frankie, goes everywhere with him in a dog stroller: church, the barber, the VA clinic. Grandpa calls it “Frankie’s limo.” He adopted him from the animal shelter two weeks after my grandma passed.
  Last October, Grandpa was moved to the ICU. The nurse at the desk said, “No dogs. I’m sorry.” I left her my number anyway. Grandpa was confused most of the time, but he kept asking for one thing: “Where’s my boy?”
  At 2 a.m., my phone buzzed. It was the nurse, Alicia: “Bring him. Use the side door.” She’d spent her shift getting approval for a compassion visit and clearing a quiet room for us.
  Alicia lifted Frankie onto the bed. He curled up straight into the crook of Grandpa’s arm, like every night for ten years. Grandpa opened his eyes and smiled. “There’s my boy.” Alicia stood in the doorway and cried with me. I’d never seen that kind of empathy from a stranger.
  Grandpa had three more days, and Frankie visited every night. At the service, Alicia sat in the back row. Now every October, I bring the ICU nurses a box of donuts. Frankie delivers them in his limo.

My rescue husky pup, Ghost, teething on his car seat. My little derpy gentleman.

• I’m a single mom. I adopted a shelter dog with separation anxiety so bad that he howls if I leave for ten minutes.
  When I finally got a job interview after four months of searching, I had no choice but to bring him. The interviewer looked at the dog, then at me, and closed my résumé folder. My stomach dropped.
  Pancake is a beagle mix, and he sat at my feet trying very hard to look like a professional. Doggy daycare is $40 a day, which, when you’re a single parent with no job, is basically a car payment.
  I started apologizing, and she just stood up and said, “Follow me.” In the corner of her office was a dog bed, and on it was a gray-muzzled greyhound. She’d adopted him from the same animal shelter. Same separation anxiety.
  She said she’d closed the folder because she’d read my résumé the night before, and the rest of the interview was “just to see if Pancake and Duke get along.” They did. We finished the interview sitting on the floor of her office with both dogs asleep between us.
  I got the job. Six months later, she convinced the company to make Fridays dog-friendly. I’ve never felt so much happiness walking into an office. That woman’s empathy changed everything for me and for Pancake.

This is from a vet trip a couple years ago — the beard is more trimmed now, but Gnasher (the goat) is doing fine.

Road trip to see grandpa. She just woke up from a nap.

Benny loves car rides, so designed and 3D printed him a simple perch with suction cup.

My 16-year-old pupper went for a bike ride today.

• I’ll admit it: I reported my 80-year-old neighbor to our HOA. Every morning at 6 a.m., he drove his golf cart around the block with his dog riding next to him, and the beeping in reverse woke up my baby. The next morning, he was waiting at the end of my driveway.
  I was ready for an argument. I’d been up all night with a teething 9-month-old, and I had a whole speech ready. Instead, he took off his cap and asked if I had a minute. His dog, Lady, is a 15-year-old Lab mix he adopted from the animal shelter the year his wife left. Her back legs gave out last spring, and she can’t walk around the block anymore.
  The golf cart is the only way she still gets her morning “walk,” sniffing the air, watching the squirrels, stopping to sniff the same mailbox she’s checked every morning for ten years.
  He goes at 6 because it’s the coolest part of the day, and because, he admitted, it’s when the house feels emptiest. He said, “I didn’t know about the baby. I’ll go without the reverse beeping. I’ll push it back by hand if I have to.” I felt about two inches tall.
  I withdrew the complaint that afternoon. The next morning, I was standing on my porch at 6 with my son on my hip when the cart came around the corner. Lady barked once. My son squealed.
  Now that’s our routine: two loops of the block, him driving, Lady in the passenger seat, me pushing the stroller alongside. My son’s first word wasn’t “mama.” It was “Lady.”
  I’ve thought a lot about how quickly I reached for a complaint instead of a conversation. A little empathy would have saved us both a bad week.

First flights!

Day trip with pets. I wish there’d better pet bird carriers that I could attach to the front mount.

Road-trip with Rabbit. We are 3 hours in a doing so good. Eating hay and veggies, and drinking lots of water on his own.

• The day we brought our dog home from the animal shelter, my mother-in-law came over to “meet the new family member.” She stood in the doorway, looked at Toby wagging his whole back end at her, and didn’t take off her coat. “Shelter dogs are damaged goods,” she said. “You don’t know where they’ve been.”
  A year later, my husband noticed her car parked outside that same shelter. He went inside and found her sitting on the floor of a kennel.
  I’d written her off as cold. For a whole year, she never petted Toby, never let him near her good couch, and at Christmas she sat with her feet tucked up so he couldn’t lie on them. He lay next to them anyway.
  It turns out she’d been volunteering at that shelter every Thursday for four months, sitting with the senior dogs nobody wanted to walk. She hadn’t told anyone because she was too proud to admit she’d been wrong.
  Later, over coffee, she told me why she’d been so harsh. When she was 9, her family moved for her father’s job and gave their dog away to a farm. She never got to say goodbye. She decided right then that she would never love another dog, because losing one hurt too much. And then Toby kept lying next to her feet.
  The dog in the kennel with her that day was Maple, a 12-year-old beagle who’s partly blind. She’d signed the adoption papers an hour before my husband walked in.
  Now Maple goes everywhere with her, riding in a padded basket buckled into the passenger seat: the garden center, the drive-through pharmacy, our house every Sunday. She sits on the good couch now.
  I’d judged her for a year without an ounce of empathy, when all along she’d been guarding a 60-year-old heartbreak. Her kindness to the dogs nobody else wanted taught me more about her than ten years of family dinners.

Whether it’s a stroller, a scooter basket or a buckled-in car seat, the best pet passengers remind us that love is mostly about showing up together. Where does your pet insist on going with you?

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