- ADVERTISEMENT - Well, happy new year. Or approximation thereof. Whether you celebrated saying “Good riddance” to 2020 at a virtual party or concert or stayed home in your holiday flannel jammies in front of the screen watching the ball drop to obliterate the old year at midnight EST so you could go to bed early, we hope that next New Year’s Eve will be more fun than quarantining with a barrel of monkeys. There weren’t many silver linings to 2020, but one of them was the number of humans who decided that since they’re at home for what’s probably going to be a long time, they need company. So they adopted a cat , a dog or a rabbit—sometimes, more than one. They then discovered that taking care of a pet isn’t as time consuming as they thought it would be in the old normal and that the benefits, particularly the ones involving unconditional love, far outweigh the cost.