Q: My wife and I are having our first baby, and the due date is next month. We have a Chihuahua, a Pomeranian and two cats, and we admit that we have spoiled them. We are wondering what we should do when we bring the baby home from the hospital. We have read that we should show the dogs a doll and make believe that it is a baby, but that seemed a bit weird, and wondered what suggestions you would have.

A: Humans have been introducing their pets to new babies for thousands of years and, realistically speaking, it has always worked out. You are correct about the doll, as dogs know this is not a person. There is nothing they can learn about human babies from watching you and your wife playing with a doll no matter how much it looks like a human baby.

My son was born into a house with eight dogs and eight cats plus all sorts of other pets, and my family and my wife’s family visualized all sorts of horrors. I had a grand game plan worked out to have a meet-and-greet for the pets and the baby, but actually common sense was the key here.

We just supervised all encounters between the animals and the baby, and gradually they all grew used to him and took him for granted. I did put a screen door at the entrance to the baby’s room that was closed all the time. This way we had an animal-free area to care for the baby at first, and the pets could still look at the baby and smell him through the screen door and satisfy their curiosity.

Another thing I did that proved helpful was to work on “get down,” “sit” and “stay” commands with the dogs over and over again before we took the baby home from the hospital. Then, when my son was toddling about, I put Plexiglas panels on the sides of my parrots’ cages so he could not put his little fingers into the cages and get bitten by them.

So it is this sort of mindset that you need to have rather than one of just following some rules and tricks. We did take the screen door off my son’s room when he was a year old, and now, 16 years later, he sleeps with cats all over him at night. So whatever we did worked out, just as it did for countless other parents for thousands of years.