Life at Home

They Scheduled a Date Just So the Cat Could Meet the Dog

Before designer Zander Schlacter and his partner quarantined together, they ran an introduction between his cat and her dog. It is the least romantic and most correct thing anyone has ever done at three weeks in, and it is why the animals still speak to each other.

By Leila Torres, Senior Living Editor

September 2, 2026 · 8 min read

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The famous cat-versus-dog war usually ends one of two ways in real homes: an uneasy armistice, or a cat who spends four years living on top of the refrigerator.

In Zander Schlacter’s Brooklyn apartment it ended with the two animals sleeping back to back, which is a genuinely strange outcome, and the reason for it is not luck. It is that before the humans made a decision about their own lives, they made one about the animals’.

The three-week date that was actually a behavioral trial

The Brooklyn artist and designer had a cat, Cowboy. His partner, the artist and writer Buzz Slutzky, had a dog, Alfie. The two of them had been together about three weeks when the pandemic arrived and the question of quarantining together stopped being hypothetical.

So they scheduled a date whose sole purpose was to introduce Alfie to Cowboy, before anyone committed to anything.

It is worth sitting with how sensible that is. Two people three weeks into a relationship, facing an indefinite lockdown, chose to run the introduction as a pilot rather than a fait accompli. Most people do this in the opposite order: sign the lease, merge the households, and let the animals sort it out in a hallway.

The animals then did what animals do, which is to take their time. They were wary of each other at the start. It took several months before they accepted one another as family, and only after that did the spooning start.

That timeline is the useful part of the story, not the cute part. Months of mutual suspicion followed by a truce is not a failed introduction. It is a successful one.

“People give a cat and a dog a weekend and then declare the experiment over,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “The realistic unit is months. If nobody has been chased, nobody has been cornered, and the cat is still eating and using the box, the introduction is going well, even if it looks like nothing is happening.”

What actually decides whether this works

The introduction protocol in the how-to above is not complicated, and almost every failure comes down to skipping one of two things.

The first is the chase. A dog who is allowed to chase a cat, even once, even in obvious play, has learned that chasing a cat is a thing that happens in this house. That single rehearsal is worth more to the dog than a month of your good intentions, and it is why the first meetings happen with the dog on a leash and end early.

The second is the cat’s exit. A cat who can leave does not have to escalate. Vertical space, a room the dog cannot enter, and a litter box in a location no dog can loom over are not luxuries, they are the pressure valve on the entire arrangement. A litter box that a dog patrols is how you get a cat peeing behind the couch, and how you get a household convinced that the cat “hates” the dog.

“Almost every cat-dog conflict I see is a real estate problem wearing a personality costume,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “Give the cat height, an exit, and a private bathroom, and the personality problem tends to resolve itself.”

The dog goes to work

Alfie commutes. He accompanies Schlacter to the studio at least once a week, and while he was hesitant at first, being deeply attached to Buzz, the routine has become something he is visibly excited by. There is a travel tote bag, and Alfie now hops into it on cue.

This is worth naming because it is a small, ordinary demonstration of the only thing that reliably changes a nervous dog’s mind: predictability. The bag comes out, the same words are said, the same trip happens, the same day of the week. What began as a stressor became a ritual, and a ritual is a thing a dog can look forward to.

Pets in a maximalist house

Schlacter’s whole practice is the opposite of restraint. His work runs on bold color, dense repeating pattern, and geometry with a sense of humor, and it has landed on blankets, pillows, apparel, wallpaper, stationery, and ceramic tile.

Asked once how pets fit into a maximalist life, his answer was immediate and unserious in the best way: someone else to accessorize. Alfie, for his part, apparently likes it. He wears onesies and tee shirts and appears to find them cozy.

That is not universal, and it is the one point in this house worth a caveat. Some dogs genuinely benefit from clothes: thin-coated and small breeds lose heat fast, and a sweater is functional gear in a New York winter, not a costume. Some dogs merely tolerate them, and a few actively shut down in them, going still and flat in a way people misread as calm. The tell is simple. A dog who is fine in clothing keeps moving, keeps sniffing, and keeps being a dog. A dog who freezes, tucks, or refuses to walk is telling you no.

The other thing a designer notices about pet products, and Schlacter has said he would love to make them, particularly pet beds, is that most of them are designed for the human’s shelf and not the animal’s body. A good bed has walls to lean against, a washable cover that survives the wash, and no loose trim to swallow. Cowboy’s own first bed was shaped like a fruit tart, immortalized in a painting Schlacter made from a photo of him in it. He has since outgrown it, which is the fate of most beautiful pet furniture.

The personality arrives late

The observation that lands hardest, for anyone about to adopt, is the one Schlacter offers about both animals: a dog or cat out of a shelter often arrives timid, and the real character stays hidden until they trust the room they are standing in. Both Cowboy and Alfie turned out to be, in his description, ridiculous. That took time.

This matches what shelters have been telling adopters for years with the rough three-day, three-week, three-month rule: three days to stop panicking, three weeks to settle into the routine, three months to become themselves. The dog or cat you meet in week one is not the animal you are adopting. It is the animal’s stress response. People return pets during that window constantly, having judged a personality that has not shown up yet.

What’s new since this was written

The designer who spoke about Cowboy and Alfie during lockdown now works under the name Zander Schlacter, and the practice has grown well past the home-textiles line he founded in 2020. He has designed collaborations with Brooklinen, Nike, and Great Jones, and built installations for Ace Hotel and Marimekko. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned his BFA in textiles, and at Pratt, and he now runs making workshops out of his Brooklyn studio along with one-on-one creative coaching sessions and a Substack called Meander.

The pet product line he wanted to make has not arrived yet. The instinct behind it, that the objects our animals live on should be as considered as the ones we live on, has only gotten more mainstream since 2022, as the pet furniture market has filled up with things that are designed to be looked at.

The house rule underneath all of it has not changed, and he has written it about his own work in words that apply neatly to a cat and a dog learning to share a couch: it is fun to have fun.