Six mistakes made in the three days after you get home. The fourth explains upsets still blamed on the stay.
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Coming home is treated as the end of the trip when it is really one more stage of it. For the animal, it is a third change of environment in a fortnight, and it is handled like the first two.
One to two days of extra sleep after a stay away are expected: the animal has spent energy on constant vigilance in an unfamiliar place.
Beyond three days, it is no longer recovery. That is the threshold to remember, because prolonged listlessness is the first sign of a great many things.
After two weeks of a shifted rhythm, snapping straight back to the usual walk and meal times produces exactly the same upsets as on the way out.
Two days of transition are enough. It is a precaution nobody takes on the way home, though everyone thinks of it on the way out.
Ticks, fleas, harvest mites, sometimes regional parasites: a stay in a natural area exposes an animal to species absent from its everyday surroundings. The check is done when you get back, not just before you leave.
Some tick-borne diseases only declare themselves weeks later. Noting the date and the area of the stay helps a vet long after you are home.
An animal used to local water for two weeks goes through a second change on getting home. Digestive upsets after the return are often explained this way, and they get blamed on the stay instead.
The same gradual transition used on the way out settles the question.
It is the hygiene reflex, and it wipes out the one familiar smell at the exact moment the animal is reclaiming its space.
Waiting two or three days, or washing only the cover and keeping the stuffing, avoids needless discomfort — except, of course, where parasites are suspected, which takes priority.
The journey the animal coped badly with, the accommodation that was too noisy, the bowl it refused: this information is precise when you get home and vague the following year.
Five lines written within the week beat a memory reconstructed twelve months on, and they turn a difficult stay into a better-prepared next one.