I am the co-caretaker of nine cats. During the years, their
companionship has been priceless, which is a good thing since they've cost me
plenty in trashed gear.
Which story would you like to hear first?

How about the time I discovered that two of my borderline feral
Maui kittens had tried, several times, to scale the front of My Dunlavy SC VI
speakers. They managed to spare the tweeters, but almost every other driver had
at least one puncture mark. I fixed the drivers and made a pair of cat-proof
speaker covers out of cardboard. Problem solved. Cats climb. Dummies forget
cats climb.
Amps, especially class A/B amps idle at the ideal temperature
for a cat siesta. So it was one afternoon that a cat who was fond of sleeping
on warm amplifiers, woke up, heaved into the amp, and sauntered off. I became
aware of the problem later that day when I noticed a peculiar smell AND one
channel of the amplifier failed, necessitating and inspection whereupon I
discovered the source of the smell and the channel outage. The amp was on loan.
That was an interesting phone call to the manufacturer. "Cat WHAT?" Oh, well we
all know it could have been worse, much worse. Two words, "Cat pee."
I once owned a 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb. For several years it
was on-loan to a friend who had a male cat who, for some reason, took offence
at the smell of my amp and decided to mark it as his own. When came home even I
noticed the smell. I had to replace not only the speaker grill fabric, but also
the plywood speaker baffle, and speaker itself; all were completely soaked
through.
Not being a dog person, I don't have any dog horror stories to
share. I'm sure some of you "dog people" do, so feel free to add stories to the
comments.
The one thing I don know about big dogs, is that they are BIG.
And when big strong dog meets slender floor-standing speaker, invariably the
speaker looses, sometimes big-time.
Of course animals are no better or worse than humans when it
comes to trashing gear...and then there's entropy and obsolescence.