Why Pet Resolutions Fail By Week 2

Episode Title: Why Pet Resolutions Fail By Week 2

Host: Amy Castro

Guest: None (Solo)

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

Transcript Note: Lightly edited for clarity and readability. Speaker labels preserved.

Show Website: petparenthotline.com

Most people quit New Year’s resolutions by week two, and pet routines are usually the first to fall apart. In this episode, Amy breaks down why pet goals fail (it’s not laziness), and walks you through a simple “tiny plan” framework that actually survives real life. You’ll learn how to shrink the goal, anchor it to what you already do, remove friction before it happens, and build a Plan B so one messy day doesn’t turn into quitting. The episode ends with a 60-second reset you can do tonight to make tomorrow easier.

Veterinary Disclaimer

This episode is for general education and is not a substitute for veterinary advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your veterinarian about your pet’s specific needs.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Joe Oakley Pet Budgeting episode: https://www.petparenthotline.com/pet-bills-keep-surprising-you-heres-how-to-plan/

Tracy Fosterling Clean Home episode: https://www.petparenthotline.com/how-i-keep-my-home-fresh-and-fur-free-even-with-8-pets/

TRANSCRIPT

Amy Castro (00:00)
Most people quit New Year's resolutions by week two, and I know exactly what that looks like in a pet house. Your dog is barking, you can't find the leash, you're already running late for your day, and today's walk becomes, maybe tomorrow.

That's not really laziness, but that is a plan that never existed. So if you're already rolling your eyes at pet parent resolutions, perfect, because in a couple of minutes I'm gonna give you one tiny plan you can start tonight so tomorrow actually works. Stay to the end of this episode too because I'll give you a 60 second reset that makes your plan easier to follow when life gets a little bit messy, which it's gonna when you have pets.

You’ve reached the Pet Parent Hotline, your lifeline to practical solutions for your toughest pet parenting challenges. I’m your host Amy Castro, and I’m here to help you cut through the noise and turn expert advice into step-by-step strategies so you can stop chasing your tail and start enjoying life with pets again.
 

Hello friends, I’m Amy Castro and by the end of this episode, you’re gonna have one small, easy to manage, repeatable plan that you can start this week that actually makes your day with pets easier. Nothing that’ll make you feel guilty, not a long list of things, and just so you know, this episode is gonna drop on my birthday, so I’m allowed to be extra honest. I also wanna let you know that our Pet Parent Power-Up episode, the one that I’m dropping on the first Wednesday of the month, drops this Wednesday January 7th and is gonna complement today’s episode really well. It’s gonna be about the best use of your time and energy. So think of today as kind of the setup and Wednesday is gonna be your filter that keeps you from pouring effort into the wrong things.
 

Alright, let’s talk about why resolutions crash and burn, especially when it comes to our pets.

I will say I’ve worked in rescue, as some of you know, for more than 15 years and rescue teaches you something really fast. Love is not the problem when it comes to pets being given up. Most pet parents love their pets. They mean well. They want to do the right things. They’re not careless and they’re not the villains that oftentimes people make them out to be. But what breaks people is the day-to-day reality of having pets. And I see this all the time when people come in very optimistic about how they’re gonna make this or that work. They tell themselves, this year I’m gonna walk my dog every day, or this year I’m finally gonna work on that training, or this year’s gonna be the year I’m gonna fix the chaos.
 

And then life shows up and work runs late and the weather is disgusting, that was my excuse over the last couple of weeks, or you’ve got kids that need something, or you’re tired, or your money is tight, your brain is fried. And suddenly that goal that you had becomes one more thing on the list of things that you’re not getting done and one more thing to basically feel like crap about.
 

So here’s what rescue has taught me. First, All of this stuff is predictable. Systems are the key. They beat intentions every day of the week. If your day does not have a structure to support the promise that you made to yourself and your pet, the promise is toast.

Second, friction kills follow through. And what I mean by that is if it’s hard, you’re not going to do it. So if you can’t find the leash, if the harness didn’t get put back where it belongs, it’s going to leave you frustrated. Or if you’re hunting for that little bag of treats that you planned on bringing with you, all of these little obstacles add up and then the plan just evaporates. If you’re like me, you start to get mad, you start to get annoyed and you say to heck with it, I’m not doing it. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow.

 The third thing is decision points are where plans die. When you’re rushed, you’re tired, your default is gonna be whatever’s gonna be easiest. If you have to make a difficult decision, that’s not gonna work. So we’re gonna come up with a plan where the decisions are already made for you.
 

And fourth is that guilt creates avoidance. We’ve all been there, we’ve all done it, whether it’s going on a diet, getting more exercise for ourselves. Once we decide, I messed up or I didn’t do it today, it turns into, well, to heck with it, let’s just give it all up. I’m not even going to start.
 

And the fifth thing that I’ve learned in rescue is that burnout is contagious. So exhausted people create stressed out pets and stressed out pets create more work for exhausted people. And that vicious cycle will eat your best of intentions for breakfast.
 

And here’s the rescue truth that I’ve seen that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, because a lot of people swear they would never give up on their pet, and most of them mean it. But stress changes the math. Money changes the math. Burnout changes the math. Life changes the math. And that’s why I take pet parenting promises so seriously, not because you’re a bad person if you slip up, but the stakes are real, and I’ve seen it every single day.
 

My goal is to keep pets in homes and keep homes livable for the humans too. And so even if you’re sitting there thinking you would never give up your pet, every single person that I have talked to on the phone over the last 15 years in rescue that is calling me to try to see if I’ll take their pet felt the same thing and believed the same thing until they hit that breaking point.
 

So let’s translate everything I just said into a few crisp reasons why resolutions tend to fail.

 Reason number one, the clean slate myth. Just because the calendar changed over, just because there’s a new number at the end of the year, doesn’t change your triggers or your schedule. Your pet’s not gonna wake up as a brand new animal on January 1st. As a matter of fact, I’m sitting here on January 1st and nothing has changed. Everybody still wanted the same things, there was still poop in the litter box, et cetera, et cetera.
 

Reason number two is that vague goals are not executable. Train more, exercise more, be more consistent, the things that we tell ourselves with our pets. What does that mean at 7:12 a.m. when you’re already running late for work and your dog is bouncing off the walls? If you can’t picture the action, it’s not a plan, it’s just kind of a vibe.

Reason number three is that motivation is incredibly unreliable. Motivation is a mood, it kind of comes and goes, and it’s going to disappear right on schedule when you’re tired or stressed out or busy.
 

And here’s the sneaky one. A lot of resolutions are just should goals. I should walk more. I should brush my dog’s teeth. I should stop giving scraps. And shoulds just come with more guilt, and guilt makes people avoid things, again, another vicious cycle.
 

So one more honesty moment. If your plan requires you to become a totally different person starting January 1st, that is not a plan. That is a personality rewrite and we’re not doing that. I’m more about, let’s work with who we are and do something that’s going to work for us and get some quick wins.
 

Let me give you an example so you can relate to some of this. I had a family that I was helping that had a super high energy dog and four kids. And their plan sounded amazing on paper. They decided every evening, everyone’s gonna pile into the car, drive to the park, and do a long walk with the dog.
 In reality, by the third day of that plan, it was chaos. One of the kids couldn’t find their shoes, another had homework that they needed to get done, the youngest had a meltdown, the dog lost his mind the second the keys came out and was jumping on everybody and scratching everybody, and the whole thing turned into a nightly argument for those three days. So the perfect plan didn’t just fail. It actually ended up making everybody, the dog, feel worse.
 

So I told them, look, shrink it. Shrink the plan and make it doable. We want to be successful. We want to achieve these goals. We can’t set them up where they’re undoable from the get-go.

So three days a week, instead of driving anywhere, each kid got to take a turn to hide two things in the yard, in their own yard, one toy and one treat. And then the other kids got to take turns being the dog guide, leading the dog around the yard while he sniffed out those hidden items.
And then they added the best part, this was their idea, the last item for the dog, the last reward, was a frozen Kong with peanut butter in it. Everybody knew where that was hidden in the yard because they intentionally saved that for the dog to find last. So what happened is after the dog had found the toy and the treat, the kids would lead him to the Kong, like it was the grand finale of this sniffing event in the backyard. The dog got some mental exercise and novelty. It bought the parents a clean transition into dinner. So the dog could either stay outside with his Kong or bring it in and go into his crate and settle while the family came in and ate their dinner. That’s a win-win. The dog’s satisfied. The house is calmer. The family gets a routine that they can actually repeat.
And they kept the park idea because they really wanted to do that, but they stopped pretending it was going to happen every day. That’s nuts. You’re setting yourself up from the get-go if you’re going to say anything’s going to happen every single day. It certainly shouldn’t be a starting point.
So they moved it to once a week on their least busy day of the week, which was Sunday. And it was going to be just a simple family walk around the block. So no car, no drama, just an opportunity to get out of the backyard, and to do something together as a family.
 

And that’s the point. You’ve got to come up with a plan that is going to fit your real life. And a plan that fits your real life is going to beat a perfect plan that you hate every single time.
 

And I’ll give you a personal example from my own life, because I make these same mistakes too. I come up with these lofty ideas. So many of you might remember the episode that I did with Tracy Fosterling about how she keeps a clean home with eight pets. Now she’s got 10 pets right now, her own pets plus fosters, and has a full-time job and everything else. And so after that episode, I got all motivated, right? I had big plans. I was gonna do all the stuff that she did and follow all of her routines and her systems, the full glow up. Did it happen like that? 

No. I should have known better, because I’m Amy Castro.
 But I did pick one thing and it made a big difference. I started her doggy bedspread, for lack of a better term, adding that to my bed. So it’s a protective extra bedspread on top of my nice bedspread that the pets can lay on. And as you know, because your bed’s going to become a fur magnet and occasionally a puke magnet. So now instead of stripping the whole bed every single time there’s fur on it or every single time somebody unfortunately pukes on it, I just pull off that one layer. And I do follow the routine that she had of shaking that bedspread out to get the hair off of it.
 

I’m shocked, because I don’t feel like my pets shed that much, but holy moly. When I took that out yesterday and shook it off, she does it every single day. I don’t do it every single day. I do it two or three times a week. And it’s not glamorous. It’s not a whole life overhaul. My house does not yet look as great as hers does, but it is a step in the right direction.
 

It makes me so much happier because I know when I go to bed at night and I roll back the dog spread, I don’t have to deal with fur in my face and that dog smell. It makes me happier. The dogs are still happy because they can get up on the bed.
 

And that’s exactly what I’m advocating for you in doing your pet plan this week. You pick one thing that’s going to stick, because one thing that’s going to stick is going to beat 10 things that you set up and quit and then feel like a failure about.
 Instead of making promises that go sideways on day one, I’m advocating that we build a pet plan that survives messy mornings and tired evenings. And this is the framework, and I want you to use it for exactly one goal this coming week.
 Here are the steps.
 

Step one, pick one problem that you’re sick of. It could be a health issue for you or your pets. It could be a behavior thing that you want to work on. Maybe it’s door dashing. It could be a budgeting thing. Go back and listen to the Joe Oakley episode on budgeting for your pet. Maybe it’s a time issue. Whatever it is, pick one thing that’s making your life harder right now.
 

Step two is to shrink it on purpose. Most of our pet goals fail because they’re built on fantasy. They assume that you have all the time and energy and perfect weather and a cooperative pet. That’s not a plan. That’s a vision board.
 

Here’s the rule. Shrink the goal to the smallest version you would still count even on a busy day, not the version you’d do when you’re hyper motivated, the version you can still pull off when you’re tired.
 

Ask yourself three questions. 

First, what is the minimum amount of time I can commit without resenting my pet? Maybe it’s five minutes. Great, start there.
 

Second, how often can you do it without turning it into a fight with your own schedule? You already know every day isn’t realistic, so stop lying to yourself. Pick two days, pick one day, pick a starting point.
 

Third, decide what done looks like in real life. It doesn’t have to be better or faster. Just give it a number.
 

Examples. If your goal is to walk more, shrink it down to 10 minutes, two days a week. Maybe it’s a relaxing sniff walk.
 

If your goal is to brush your dog’s teeth, maybe it’s 30 seconds, two nights a week. If your dog hates it, start with them licking toothpaste off the brush or touching the brush to their front teeth and stopping before it turns into a fight.
 If your goal is training, maybe 60 seconds before dinner. Sit three times. Down three times. Door manners three times. Small is repeatable, and repeatable can be life changing.
 

Step number three is to anchor this new action to something you already do. If you check the mail, that’s your sniff walk trigger. If you brush your teeth, that’s your dog teeth trigger. Anchors turn intentions into actions.
 

I’ll give you an example from my personal experience. I tie things to feeding the pets. I’ve tied litter box scooping to feeding. Every morning I hit the coffee button, I feed the cats and scoop their box. At noon, when I feed the dogs, I scoop the box. At night, when I feed the cats again, I scoop the box. The anchors turn our intentions into actions.
 

One warning though, be very careful if you decide you’re going to put your dog’s toothbrush and toothpaste near yours. Chicken flavored dog toothpaste does not taste good. That’s all I got to say about that subject.
 

Step number four is remove the friction before it happens. Fix the tiny obstacles now. If you’re dog walking, make sure the leash is always where you can grab it, or have multiple. We have by our back door a little unit with baskets, and there’s a whole basket full of dog leashes. There’s a box of harnesses and collars. Put treats where you’re actually going to use them. Put the toothbrush on the counter. Make it easy for yourself to do the right thing.
 

Step number five is make a plan B for when life happens. If you don’t have a backup plan, one messy day becomes quitting. If it rains, do seven minutes of indoor sniffing. If you’re exhausted, do two sits instead of five. If your day explodes, do the smallest version instead of nothing. Plan B is not cheating. Plan B keeps the momentum.
 

Step number six is track repetitions, not perfection. Tracking is proof, not punishment. Check marks on a calendar, a notes app, whatever works. Measure repetitions, not vibes.
 

And finally, step number seven, watch for the quiet wins. A calmer morning. Easier walks. Fewer spirals. Less barking. Those are the signs your system is working.
 

One of the ways you can know your plan is concrete is to follow this format. After I fill in the blank, I will fill in the blank for blank minutes, blank days this week. After I make the coffee, I will walk the dog for five minutes, two days this week.
 

On Wednesday, January 7th, the Pet Parent Power Up episode, I’m gonna share with you one question I use constantly to decide if I’m spending my time and energy in the smartest place. So if you’ve ever felt busy, but things aren’t getting any better, don’t miss that one.
 

So I challenge you this week, get that one sentence together and send it to me. Email it, DM it, or leave a voicemail on the website. Just hit that little microphone on our website and record a message. One sentence, that’s all. And if you want to share that in the Pet Parent Insiders group, come on over and share it there so we can help clarify it and make this the year you accomplish that.
 

I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that there’s a bonus idea here for you. It’s called a 60 second pet plan reset, and I want you to do this tonight. It’s gonna make tomorrow easier.
 

Pick the one tiny goal that you chose for the week and the reset is to remove the friction point that usually stops you. If your goal is to get the dog out for a walk, tonight put that leash by the front door, put the harness by the front door, put your shoes by the front door. And if you’re like me, tuck the socks inside the shoes. No excuses.
 

If your goal is enrichment, get that enrichment toy, that frozen Kong, whatever it’s going to be, and set it up tonight so it’s ready to go first thing in the morning. Make the right action the easy action.
 

Because no matter how great your plans are, you’re still going to be busy, you still might be tired, your pet might still be a little bit extra, but you’ll be set up and everything’s gonna be so much easier to accomplish. And that’s the difference between a resolution and a plan.
 

So until next time, I hope your routines feel a little bit easier with this plan and you’re better able to find that balance and that peace in your household that you’ve been looking for. Thanks for listening to the Pet Parent Hotline. If you enjoyed the show, don’t keep it to yourself. Text a friend right now with a link and tell them I’ve got a show that you need to hear, and ask them to let you know what they think. And remember, your pet’s best life starts with you living yours. So be sure to take good care of yourself this week and your pets.