Best Holiday Deals on Pet Products

The Pet Gear Happy Trails Lite is a solid pick. It’s easy to assemble, and the no-zipper functionality on the canopy gives quick and easy access to your pet. True to its name, the Happy Trails Lite is incredibly lightweight at just 11.5 pounds, which makes for very easy transport by car. From start to finish, this pet stroller earned high marks for ease of use, from assembly to popping it into the trunk to storing it under a bed. The mesh design and paw rest give your pet plenty of visibility, but our evaluator noted that it’s not the roomiest. It’s rated for pets up to 25 pounds, but still might be cramped.

The PetSite 3-in-1 has been as little as $96, so this isn’t quite the best price, but it’s close. It is multifunctional, easy to assemble and fold, lightweight, and sturdy. It’s also really versatile for travel. It serves as both a car seat and a portable carrier, complete with a carrying strap. It has a maximum capacity of 33 pounds, so you could potentially fit two small animals, and the mesh top makes it easy to keep an eye on them. Our evaluator reported that it was easy to assemble, and the stroller moved easily, even on bumpier surfaces.

This is the best price we’ve seen for the Furbo dog camera. In evaluating the best pet cameras, this was our editors’ top choice, thanks to its aesthetically pleasing design and camera with a wide viewing angle. The ability to choose a voice prompt for the treat toss is a bonus. The device’s basic app features include live view, tossing treats, talking to and hearing your pet, and barking alerts. The nanny cam subscription includes cloud recording, advanced barking alert, Doggie Diary (a video summary of the day that you can choose to save to your device), activity alert, selfie alert, and person alert. And yes, you can still use the Furbo if you have a cat.

Pair this lickable food mat with a delectable treat to keep your kitty content and happily occupied. Mary Beth Quirk, one of CR’s shopping editors, spreads Churu purée treats on the mat with the spatula provided and attaches them to her cat Frannie’s food tray with the suction cups on the bottom. “She’ll spend minutes on end cleaning out every nook and cranny, leaving me to work in peace,” she says. 

With a customizable LED screen and RFID technology that locks the bowl lid so that food won’t be dispensed until you program it, this smart feeder takes a high-tech approach to feeding your dog or cat. You can set schedules via its app, and it offers a voice recording feature to call your pets to meals. 

The Chuckit Classic is ideal for dog owners who are searching for a low-tech ball launcher. It requires no setup and still allows you to get involved in a game of fetch, but takes your natural throwing arm to the next level. The plastic handheld launcher comes with one fuzzy 2.5-inch tennis ball that is stored in its “claw,” which keeps a solid grip on it so that it doesn’t fall out. When you’re ready to play with your pup, you treat the launcher like it’s an extension of your own arm—pulling it back and then launching it forward to release the ball from the claw. 

One of the nicest things about this launcher is that you can retrieve balls (including saliva-coated slobbery ones) with the claw itself so that you never have to touch the ball with your hands.

The Petlibro Dockstream Smart Pet Fountain is a WiFi-enabled device that lets you accurately monitor your pet’s water intake. It holds more than half a gallon of water, and the whole fountain is wireless. It even has a motion sensor, so it only runs when your pet approaches it, making the battery last even longer. The app can also alert you when water levels are low, which is especially nice since the container is opaque. I own the non-smart version and rely on the indicator light (and the pesky sound of the pump struggling to suck up water when the level is too low), which isn’t ideal.

This is a great, budget-friendly option if you’re not sure your pets will adapt from a bowl to a fountain. You can try it out without investing too much (and you can always invest more in an upgrade later on if you want). The Veken water fountain, consisting of five parts, was intuitive for our tester to assemble. The carbon and foam filter replacements are low-cost as well, at $11 for a four-pack or $25 for 16. It was the noisiest option, but that didn’t deter the tester’s pets. The flower can also be removed for a low-profile bubbler effect, rather than a raised fountain.

Casper, the same company that sells mattresses, designed its Casper Dog Bed, which is typically $139 to $249 depending on size, with two layers of foam construction (including memory foam), a soft nylon-polyester-olefin cover that fits tightly over its rectangular cushion, and raised bolsters around all four sides. While our first impression of the FurHaven bed was “soft” and “cozy,” this pick has a sturdier and more structured appearance and feel. The cover is removable and machine-washable and comes in three sizes to accommodate dogs up to 90 pounds. (We wish it were offered in a larger size to suit really big breeds.) Casper offers a 30-night risk-free trial and a one-year limited warranty, so you have the option of returning the bed if your dog doesn’t take to it.

Overall, this Kenmore Intuition BU4050 bagged model is a strong performer that’s also budget-friendly. It has a lift-away feature for portability, suction control, and a small powerhead that’s powerful enough to pick up embedded dirt from carpets. Another plus is the hair eliminator feature on the brush roll that’s designed to prevent hair entanglements.

Stainless steel litter boxes have grown popular recently, thanks largely to the nonstick material that is much easier to clean than other traditional litter boxes. I personally own a stainless box for my cats, and it really is a simpler process to get everything disinfected when I change out the litter. And our evaluator had a similar experience, saying it only took a few swipes with soap and water and a generous rinsing to get it shining like new again. The one thing I will say is the sound of your cats digging around is much different (and much louder) when they’re scratching metal versus plastic.

The Casfuy Dog Nail Grinder is a two-speed grinder with three grinding ports that are designed to suit the size of your dog’s nails. Because it was less powerful than the Dremel, it took longer to get a nail down to the same length. However, it was also quieter, which made it a better choice for the more anxious dog in our evaluations. It does lack a safety guard, but because it operates more slowly, it’s easier to watch your progress and stop before you reach the quick.

If you can have only one pet hair removal tool in your cleaning toolbox, this is the one. The ChomChom is the only tool our testers evaluated that gathers and picks up all of the pet hair it touches. After just three forward and backward swipes, our velvet and linen-polyester pillows were left almost completely free of hair. It was the best tool on carpet, too, and no other tool we tested left it as hair-free as the ChomChom. An evaluator who has carpal tunnel syndrome noted that this tool required significantly less pressure to use, which meant that her condition wasn’t aggravated as it was with a few of the other pet hair removers. It’s also worth noting that three of our at-home evaluators liked this tool so much that they bought it for themselves post-evaluation.

The Analan Mini Pet Hair Remover is a triangle-shaped device that has three unique ridged sides, and it did very well in our evaluations. The rubber material created a static attraction with our velvet pillow so that it was able to pick up all of the cat hair we applied to the surface. But this was the only surface where it picked up hair. On the polyester-linen blend pillow, it bunched up the hair in easier-to-pick-up piles. Ditto for the carpet, where it did a great job of gathering up the hair in neat piles, but we did notice some redepositing of hair on subsequent swipes as it became stuck on the ridges. The hole in the center of the triangle allows for a comfortable grip. Because the ridged surfaces are so small, cleaning a large area, like a whole upholstered couch, takes a significant amount of time.

The Cube is not specifically intended for pet tracking but to help people keep track of a range of possessions, including cars, luggage, and kids’ backpacks, as well as pets. That puts the Cube at a disadvantage as a pet tracker, despite its competent core tracking abilities. The device is relatively large and heavy, but most dog collars won’t fit through its thin slots, so you need to purchase an add-on collar clip for $25. More significantly, the app lacks pet-specific features like fitness and activity tracking and a light beacon for spotting your dog at night.

On the other hand, it does let you set a home “safe zone” and virtual fence and emits a fairly loud sound alert. It’s also very solidly constructed, creates detailed and easy-to-read location histories, and, like the Link, is capable of delivering high-temperature alerts.

The Link pet tracker has a very bright light for spotting your dog in the dark. And unlike some other models, the app’s activity tracking features differentiate between minutes spent walking and running. That can be a useful feature if you want to make sure your dog gets some high-intensity exercise each day. It also monitors ambient temperature to alert you if the environment is too hot or cold. But the app doesn’t record or map its location history, something that many other trackers do.