If you own furry friends with 4 legs, cats and dogs in particular, it is important to keep your furry friends safe at this time of year. If you use an artificial Christmas tree, here's a few pet safety 101 rules, and some modern Christmas pet safety hacks and tricks to make your tree and decorations pet proof.

1) anchor your Christmas tree, and make sure it is stable. If the tree isn't stable, your pet can be curious, and knock down the Christmas Tree, making a huge mess. In this picture below, shows what may happen if you don't properly anchor down and stabilise the Christmas Tree.

2) what ever you do, don't put chocolate ornaments on your tree, as dogs can get sick if they sneak a chocolate ornament off the bottom branches of the tree. Never feed a dog chocolate, makes them sick, considered poisonous. Keep any selection boxes and chocolate ornaments away from your canine friends.

3) never use tinsel, as dogs can chew on it, and if swallowed, can obstruct the digestive system of your dog, and if this does happen, seek medical advice immediately.

4) opt for plastic baubles and not glass ones as glass can smash easy. And pets think they can be able to play with the baubles.

5) if you are using a real tree, never put chemicals in to the tree's water tub, as this can lead to animals drinking the water, and if full of chemicals, it can be harmful to animal life.

6) most important of all, dogs, cats, rambunctious puppies and playful kittens and Christmas tree light cables are a recipe for disaster. These reason for this is because they can chew through the cable for the tree lights.... If they do, they suffer electric shock injury. Which can be treated by your vet. If electric shock injury is covered by your pet insurance.

This covers the dos and don'ts of Christmas pet safety. Now I am going to discuss clever hacks and ideas to further petproof your Christmas tree.

Hack 1) a high metal tree fence is ideal for to disallow your pets from sneaking up to the Christmas Tree to play with the ornaments.

While there's spacing for kittens to sneak through the fence, I suggest that you use think tarp wrapping.

2) stop your pup's and kittens chewing your Christmas tree lights cable with a wonderful product called the JML brand cable tidy, not only does it tidy up loose cables, but with a tough material, it can be tough to chew through, that your trees lights are saved.

That covers the safety of our furry friends at Christmas time.