on the street · down on the floor with the animals · the end of the day · the lamp not on
A shopfront on the street, at the height of the animals
Pets
Co-regulating with the animals we live with, and a pet flap to every room on the street with animals in it.
This room is the floor at the end of the day. The dog is asleep on the rug, the cat has curled up beside the dog, a rabbit is loafing by the skirting board, and the light in the window is going. Nobody has switched the lamp on, because getting up would mean moving somebody, and nobody wants to. That is the whole room: being still with an animal until you are as settled as they are.
Its channel on the CB is for your animals: pictures, stories, worries and questions, the ones who are gone, and the ones still waiting at the shelters. Sign on and tune the radio to This room while you are in here, or open Pets on the chat page, under Community. If you are not on the CB yet, the Community Center says how to get an invite. Our campfires have always said the same thing:
Come as you are. Bring your pets, your fidgets, your safe snacks.
Co-regulation, and why it is not only people
Co-regulation is how one nervous system steadies another. Our entry for it opens with Trauma Geek’s definition:
Co-regulation is when we complete the stress cycle with the support of a safe enough person.
Most of what gets written about it is about people: a parent and a baby, a teacher and a child, a friend who sits with you while it passes. It is not only people. Mammals do it with each other, with their own kind and with other kinds, and the lines our Polyvagal Theory entry quotes say so in as many words:
Co-regulation (the subconscious process of syncing up with a coherent nervous system) is the strongest safety cue for mammals.
The polyvagal understanding of the nervous system seems to be observable in all humans, and all mammals for that matter, including cats, dogs, and horses.
The same definition says what a safe enough person is like:
A safe enough person is a person in safe & social mode. They have deep belly breathing, expressive face, soft gaze, calm heart rate, prosodic voice, and the ability to enjoy safe touch or closeness.
Leave out the face and the voice, and that is a dog asleep against your legs, or a cat purring on your chest: breathing slow and deep, eyes half shut, heart steady, and glad of you close. Lie still beside that for long enough and your own body starts to keep time with it.
Why it matters so much to so many Autistic people
For a lot of Autistic people an animal is the easiest company there is, and the most settling. An animal does not want eye contact or small talk, does not take a stim for something wrong with you, and never needs anybody to mask. It says plainly what it wants, its day has the same shape every day, and you can be with it without doing anything at all.
Being with somebody does not have to mean doing something together, or even being in the same room. Helen Edgar writes about co-regulating in ways that suit each person’s physical, social and sensory needs:
For example, joining an online game, sharing music in a chat room or knowing you are each happy being in your own dens/spaces in your house can all be meaningful ways of co-regulating.
A cat asleep in the next room counts. So does a dog who follows you from room to room and lies down wherever you stop, which our Body Doubling entry has a word for, and which leaves room for a pet:
A “body double” (n.) is a person or even pet who is present with us while we work.
An animal is sensory company too. A dog leaning its whole weight on your legs is deep pressure, stroking fur is a stim, and a purr is a sound with no words in it to work out. Our Seeds of Cope puts co-regulation in its cope map, among what helps when fear, shame or trauma comes up, and our Glimmers entry has this among the small moments that bring peace, joy or connection:
Watching your pet’s excitement over something small
And for everybody else
It is not only Autistic people. Plenty of people talk to the dog when they cannot talk to anybody, get up in the morning because the cat wants feeding, and go outside because the dog does. People have lived alongside animals for far longer than anybody has been writing it down, and a body that settles with a warm animal against it is one of the oldest kinds of company there is.
Not everybody can live with an animal: allergies, rent, money, a body that cannot manage the walks, or an animal who died and is still missed. The animals on this street need none of that. Anybody can visit them, nothing about them costs anything, and none of them will ever need walking at six in the morning.
And a dog in a harness may be working. Our Event Access Guide passes on Midwest FurFest’s line about that:
Do not pet, feed, or otherwise distract a service dog. Please approach their handler before interacting.
Pet flaps along the skirting board
Every room on the street with animals in it has a pet flap here, set into the skirting board at the height of whoever uses it. They are this room’s flaps, drawn in its dusk, and each one opens onto a room that is its own world. Go through any of them; the floor will still be here when you come back, and so will everybody asleep on it.
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Waiting for a home
Animals turn up out on the street and under it, somebody signed on to the CB brings them in and names them, and anybody can adopt one.
- Rescue A CatA street with the lights out and a torch in your hand, and now and then a cat in the dark who needs bringing in.
- Rescue A DogThe park the morning after snow, and a dog out there who needs bringing in. Follow the prints.
- Rescue Small AnimalsUnder the floorboards of a shop, where a rabbit, a rat, a mouse, a hamster, a gerbil, a guinea pig, a chinchilla, a ferret or a hedgehog turns up in a strip of daylight.
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Somewhere to go with them
Where the shelters’ cats and dogs come out, and where the ones you adopted can be let out for a while among them.
- Pekoe and PurrsA cat café with a window at every height cut to the size of a cat, every cat from the shelter in it, and one on your lap if they want to be.
- The RunA dog park painted in the colours a dog can see, with a porch, a blue ball and every dog from the shelter out for a run.
- Truckin’ Food CourtThe Truck Stop, where one of the five trucks makes nothing but treats for dogs, and every bag says so.
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Animals of another kind
A home for good for animals nobody else could keep, and a creature of your own making to keep you company.
Your own animals on the street
- Adopt one. Adopt an animal at one of the shelters and they come home to Profile on your CB radio, where you can give them a name, show them to anybody who presses your handle, and send one to the channel as a sticker.
- Let them out. A cat you adopted can be let out in Pekoe and Purrs, and a dog off the lead on the Run, among the animals still waiting for homes, until you take them home again. Their card says they have a home, and never whose.
- Badges. The Adventurer’s Guild has one for bringing an animal in, Rescue Ranger, and one for adopting one, Pet Parent. Nothing on the street knows who rescued which animal, so the first is only ever in your own browser.
- A familiar. A chimera you make at Chimera Obscura can follow you from room to room, sitting wherever there are no words, the way a cat does.
- The forums. Pets in the forums is for pictures, stories, worries and questions about your animals, and keeps a topic 3 months after its last post.
What is not on the floor
- Nothing clinical. An animal is company, not a treatment, and nothing here says what one will do for your health. This room is not a vet either: an animal who is ill or hurt needs one.
- No best pet. Nobody here is told which animal to get, and no animal, kind or breed is ranked above another. There is no standard pet.
- Nobody counted. Nothing here counts anybody’s animals. The shelters never say who rescued or adopted anybody, and nor does this room.
- Nothing for sale. No animal on this street has a price on it, and none ever will.
- Nothing moves. Everybody is asleep, so nothing in this room moves at any setting, MAX GLITTER included, and the lamp is never switched on. The fractal window at the foot of the page moves only when you switch it on, in a window of its own.
Who reads the channel, and for how long
- Everybody signed on to the CB can read this room’s channel, so say only what you would say in a room with all of them in it. It keeps the house norms, like every channel.
- Every message on it goes 48 hours after it was sent, like every channel on the CB. For something that needs longer, Pets in the forums keeps a topic 3 months after its last post.
- Pictures of your animals are welcome, and a picture goes when its message does. It is redrawn in your own browser before it leaves, which takes off where it was taken, as the privacy page says.
- Nobody on it is a vet. For an animal who is ill or hurt, a vet. For help with what looking after one costs, Community Care is the room for asking.
Whose this is
- Most of the words quoted here are other people’s: Trauma Geek, NDConnection, Helen Edgar, a video on body doubling, Julie Bjelland and Midwest FurFest, each named under their words with where the words come from, and read on our own pages rather than in the originals, which nobody read for this room. The lines with no other name on them are ours. Everything round the quotations is ours too, written for this room.
- The floor at the end of the day is ours, and nobody is drawn on it: the animals are nobody in particular, and the person lying there is you. It was drawn as code by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, to Ryan’s brief, and so were the pet flaps, which are this room’s drawings and not the rooms’. Nothing on this page calls an AI while you read it.
- Every quotation in this room is 40 words or fewer and was read on one of our own pages, Co-regulation, Polyvagal Theory, Body Doubling, Glimmers, Event Access Guide, Campfire Learn Together, on 2026-10-24.
tools/make-pets.pychecks each one against those pages word for word whenever our copy of stimpunks.org is on the machine. - The type is Coiny, by Marcelo Magalhães, for the room’s name and its headings, and Zen Maru Gothic, by Yoshimichi Ohira, for everything you read, both under the SIL Open Font License, read off their own records. More in the liner notes.
Job marker — a collar tag come off on the floor by the skirting board, with a paw stamped on it
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: Who it is strongest for
Before the code: Co-regulation is the strongest safety cue for which animals, in the line our Polyvagal Theory entry quotes?
Hint 1
It is in the first quotation after the paragraph that says it is not only people.
Hint 2
Cats, dogs, horses and people are all one.
Last hint
Mammals.
Give me the answer
The answer is Mammals. The line our Polyvagal Theory entry quotes says co-regulation, the subconscious process of syncing up with a coherent nervous system, is the strongest safety cue for mammals, and the next one says that includes cats, dogs and horses.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: COLLARTAG
That is the one.
The line our Polyvagal Theory entry quotes says co-regulation, the subconscious process of syncing up with a coherent nervous system, is the strongest safety cue for mammals, and the next one says that includes cats, dogs and horses.
Quest code: COLLARTAG
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so — and on this floor nothing moves at any setting, MAX GLITTER included, because everybody is asleep.