What age would you leave your child home alone if you have a dog?

[Lemonsand]

Might be a daft question but I've just been having a think about how its time to start leaving my DS for short periods of time to build up his independence. I may be overthinking this but I'm not sure if its ok to leave him with the dog. Shes the soppiest thing and they are best friends but for some reason it worries me that they'd be alone. I've always been a believer that children under a certain age and dogs should be supervised and I think this is where my worries are coming from. Just interested to hear opinions on this really.

If DS (10) is off School sick I leave him at home while I take the dog for a walk of 10-15 minutes. He knows how to phone me as I’m on my in the woods backing onto our garden
In Feb he was off sick for a week and I really needed to pop to the shops. He wanted me to leave him but I put the dog away ( has his own room anyway). I am pretty confident that DS and DDog would be ok left alone together but since it’s not necessary I don’t. DD is Ddogs favourite person in the whole world and she’s been left alone with him from around 12

My son is 8 and I will leave him at home for 15-20 minutes at the most, with the dog in the house.

Sounds fine to me.

BUT - my first thought at 10/11 being left alone for an hour would be 'I'm taking the dog for a walk'.

It might be worth having chats about that/making sure he gets to be the person with the lead just in case he decides to do it when you haven't prepared him in advance/even if you've told him not to.