Cute Pet Stories

I’ll go first.

When Kaia was younger, she was very, very feisty. She played aggressively and hard. She is also a very smart cat. She had a favorite toy, which we called “Ball” which was a rubber ball with mylar streamers. She would work herself so hard chasing that thing that she could barely walk and she would pant for the next half hour, if we let her. Usually we would put Ball away before she got that worn out though. We had to put Ball away, because if she found it she would have eaten it. We also had to keep moving the hiding place, because she would eventually find it. She learned how to open a kitchen drawer to get it out, for example.

When you got Ball out, she knew. I don’t know if she could hear it, or smell it, or what, but if you put it in your pocket or under your shirt, and came into the room, she woudl run over to you, meowing and meowing and sniffing you all over looking for Ball.

When you put Ball away, she would follow you around a bit, complaining, and then she would go into wherever you had been, and meow and meow looking for it. For a good 20 minutes.

She was an excellent hunter…the sort of cat who would chase the mailman if we let her outside. I bet she could catch birds mid-flight 9 out of 10 tries. Fortunately, all she ever got to catch was moths.

To illustrate her methods and skill, here is a comparison:
Ding and Kaia were on the floor in front of the couch. I had one of those “fishing rod” toys, a long stick with a string and a bunch of feathers at the end. I’d wave it around first for one, then the other, back and forth so they both got turns. Ding isn’t the brightest cat in the universe. She is very, very sweet, but a bit awkward and a bit … well the first part about her not being bright is dead on. When it was her turn, she would flail wildly, up on her hind legs, standing up batting in all directions, leaping into the air, twisting around, falling over, and being generally and ineffectually acrobatic. I think she may have caught it once or twice total. She had a great time, though, and she had no idea that she sucked.

Contrast that with Kaia’s playing: She would crouch down a bit, totally still. Just her eyes and sometimes her head moving to follow the toy, no matter how excitingly we made it fly and flop around. She would wait until she was ready, then she would move, like a spring uncoiling, lightning fast and deadly accurate. The next thing anyone knew, she had the thing in her mouth and was trying to drag it off under the coffee table. It was neccessary to go and pry it out of her mouth, because if you pulled on the string, she would clamp down and back away from you, never letting go. She broke the string several times doing this, and once the plastic rod even snapped. She caught the toy almost every time, in one move.

She also liked to play tag. The other cats didn’t like this game, because she scared the crap out of them, so she played it with us. She would initiate the game by coming up to you, then running away, and looking back to see if you were following. Then you chased her, fast as you could, to the other end of the house. She would flee, and usually go right to some corner. Then she would turn around and pause. This was your cue to run. You would run to the other end of the house, and she chased hot on your heels. When you were cornered, you turned around and paused, and she ran away. She could play this game for hours.

She was pure muscle, built more like a wild cat than a domestic cat. She was strong and tough. She liked to beat up dogs (we occassionally had dogs at our house, and once we dog-sat a german shepherd/chow mix for a month and she trapped that poor thing in the kitchen more times than I can count) and she would break toys within days of them being purchased.

…but then she had a gentle side.

She knew what babies were. When we rescued two kittens from a nearby parking garage, she was gentle with them. When we got a baby ferret, she absolutely went nuts. She LOVED Spot. Spot LOVED her. They were best buddies. Spot liked to roughhouse. Kaia liked to roughhouse. Kaia was strong. Spot was unbreakable. It was a match made in heaven.

But Spot was a baby, and was a lot smaller than Kaia. We were amazed at how she toned down her play to deal with Spot… she totally pulled her punches, she ran slower, she let Spot “get her” sometimes when she could easily have gotten away. Spot would go nuts as ferrets do… hopping around backwards and flopping around making little ferret noises.

Probably the most disturbing part was that Kaia would carry Spot around. Ferrets, as you know, are very flexible. They tend to be very limp when carried. Dangling from a cat’s mouth, they look fairly dead. Even worse was that Kaia sometimes picked up Spot by the scruff of his neck… but other times she picked him up by his throat. Spot didn’t really care one way or the other. He didn’t mind much, though. It was quite disconcerting to see Kaia stroll through the room with a limp ferret hanging from her mouth by its throat, though…


Nowadays, Kaia is about 10 years old. She has fattened up, mellowed out, and settled down. She is still strong, still accurate, but she likes to lay around more than chase things. She has become very snuggly and demanding. If she wants to snuggle with you, she wants to snuggle NOW and you drop what you are doing and snuggle or else.

Hrm. That came out a whole lot longer than I intended. I was mainly gonna write about the thing with Spot, but I wanted to give some back story. Heh.

I’ll go. This oughta be an interesting thread.

My cat Nicky is a mimic. My husband was spackling the ever-present crack in the living room ceiling a few weeks ago, up on the ladder. He climbed back down, and went out to wash off the spackling knife. He came back in and shrieked. Nicky was up on the very top of the ladder, scraping his claw across the fresh spackle, just like he had been doing moments before.
When I wash the dishes in the sink, he jumps up on the edge of the sink and tries to stick his paws in the water and touch the dirty dishes. I can only think he’s trying to help.
When I’m on the computer, he gets on my lap and touches the keys on the keyboard. He’s always RIGHT THERE, into whatever we’re doing. He’s a nut.

My other cat Kipper is self-appointed guardian of my five-year-old son. She sleeps with him, watches him in the tub, kneads on him only (occasionally me, but mostly him, and no one else in the house) and follows him around all the time.
Once, my husband leaned over to kiss my son before leaving early for work, and Kipper was sleeping curled up right next to him, and when my husband got down close to him, she hissed at him. :eek:

My parents have two dogs, Nanama (Shepherd/husky mix, white except where a shepherd would be black. Those places, she’s peach) and Lucky Tuesday (White Shepherd. The vet says he’s a mixed breed, but he doesn’t look mixed).

Both dogs were rescues. Both dogs have personality quirks. Nana will bring you a ball and drop it by your feet for you to kick/throw. She will do this for hours, but the game works a little differently than “fetch.”

Human throws ball.
Nana catches ball.
Nana carries ball into house.
Nana drops ball into water dish.
Nana eats food.
Human fetches ball from water dish (with various “yuck” sounds, usually).
Nana follows human back outside.
Repeat.

Lucky is not nearly as intelligent as Nana (SC’s Sister: “He’s retarded.”) Of course, he was so starved when they got him that you could count all his ribs, all the bones in his spinal cord and see the ball of his hips. So malnutrition could have led to brain problems. Anyway. Lucky’s favorite toy is his “nookie.” (It’s a giant fuzzy 3-d asterisk with squeaky things in the points.) He happily carries the nookie around until you manage to take it from him. Then, the game goes like this:

Human pretends to throw nookie, handing it to another human or hiding it.
Lucky follows the “thrown” nookie, then looks back at thrower in total bewilderment.
Thrower holds out hands and says, “no nookie.”
Lucky looks around for the “missing” nookie.
Human in possession of the nookie squeaks a squeaker.
Lucky looks bewildered.
Continue until nookie is located or human decides to throw for real.
Repeat.

Lucky is a dog, too. He absolutely has to be wherever you are, no matter whether having all 80 pounds of him underfoot is convenient or not. And, when all of us are in the house he has to have us in the same room, or at least where he can keep an eye on all of us at once. It’s very upsetting to him when Dad & I are out watching TV in the front room & Mom’s in the back room on the computer. He cries. (He’s a big crybaby anyway.)

Nana’s much more independent.

My Dearly departed dog BiBi, was bad about digging in the yard. We didn’t have a fence, so when she was outside, we had her on one of those cable things. I had planted some tulips at the edge of the yard, thinking they were out of her reach. After they began to bloom, she became very interested in them.
She started digging a bunch of holes around her doghouse. One day I went outside and 3 of my tulips were gone. I expected to see the remains all over the yard, but BiBi had transplanted them next to her doghouse. They weren’t in the best shape, but they were in the holes she had dug, with the blooms sticking out.

Oh, one more thing about Nicky the cat.
He plays Fetch. I can throw one of those balls with a jingle bell inside it (the one like a little cage), and he’ll go after it and bring it back in his mouth. He’ll drop it at your feet, then take a couple steps and wait expectantly for you to throw it again. He can play that for 30-40 minutes.

hillbilly, that is the funniest thing I’ve read all day!! How adorable!!

This just happened about two weeks ago. I came home with my groceries, including a big bag of Nine Lives dry kibble. Since the kitchen cabinet was too cluttered for the bag to fit, I set it down on the floor in front of the cabinet until I could make room for it.

While I was putting away the rest of the groceries, one of my cats, Lucia, came into the kitchen. When she saw the bag, she reacted very strongly, crouching down, puffing up her tail, and then creeping forward cautiously. At first, I thought that she was simply suspicious of this new, strange thing in her familiar surroundings; then, I realized that what she was reacting to was the big, orange face of Morris on the bag.

I stood very still, with one hand over my mouth to keep from laughing as, slowly, Lucia crossed the kitchen toward this intruder, ducking and bobbing and weaving. Then, when she was close enough and had worked up her nerve-

Bap!

She gave Morris a good punch in the nose!

B-bap!

Another punch!

And Lucia fled the room to hide under the dining room table until the intruder was safely stowed away.

She still peeks warily around the kitchen before she enters. You never know where Morris might be hiding.

Shortly after we got married, we got Wendell - a gorgeous Himalayan kitten. He had two bizarre quirks: He LOVED Dunkin Donuts blueberry cake donuts, and he loved to fetch a balled-up Dunkin Donuts bag.

We lived in a tiny little townhouse at the time, laid out so that if we were in our bed, we could throw the balled-up bag, bank it off the wall, and it’d go down the stairwell. Wendell would run after it and bring it back to the bed - over and over. One day he got a little over-enthusiastic. After we threw the “ball”, we heard him running down the steps, then BAM, he hit the wall at the foot of the stairs. That was the end of play that day.

Poor little guy died a few months later. Vet’s best guess was that he had feline leukemia - this was in the days before the disease was well-known. Poor Wendell. He was a cook kitty.

We had a cat, Fluffy, who occasionally liked to watch TV. One night we were watching Animal Kingdom or something of that nature–a special on big cats. Fluffy was riveted; meowing and hissing at the screen. The TV cut to a high-contrast shot of a big cat running across snow—the cat went off the edge of the screen and Fluffy was bewildered. She checked around both sides of the set, walking behind it and coming back to check the screen to figure out where the cat had gone.

Fluffy also saved us from a fire. She was normally a fairly quiet cat but on this particular night, she was harassing my mother so badly she decided to put Fluffy downstairs. When my mom went downstairs, she discovered that the clothes dryer was smoking–somehow the timer had failed. Fluffy immediately settled down once Mom stopped the dryer and aired out the smoke.

My current cat, Max, is vicious toward stuffed animals because of their shiny eyes–he goes right for the face every time.

Ooo, pet stories… I’ve got so many! Where to start?

My family has two golden retrievers. Joe is almost 3, and Roxy is almost 4. We got Joe as a puppy, then Roxy came to us about a year ago after the breeder decided she’d be better off in a family. Roxy is smaller than Joe, but she’s got him completely under her paw (so to speak).

In summer, my dad takes the dogs to the beach every Saturday and Sunday morning, so they can run and swim and play with all the other dogs. He puts his towel down, then takes the dogs running up the beach a little way, then turns around and comes back. When they start getting near where he’s left his towel, Joe runs up the beach, and sniffs at all the towels in sight (quite a few on a Sunday morning at the dog beach) until he figures out which one is Dad’s. Then he lies down on the sand next to it, and waits for Dad and Roxy to catch up, looking so proud of himself.

Roxy is a real snugglepot - if she feels she’s being neglected, she will come and put her head on your lap until she gets some attention. When she is being stroked or cuddled, she makes a kind of snorting sound, a little like a snore, or a canine version of a purr. She also has a sweet habit of coming to sit at your feet, putting her head in your lap, looking up lovingly at you with her big brown doggy eyes… and burping in your face.

I could go on all night… I’ll restrain myself now :slight_smile:

Well, I don’t know if it’s cute so much as it’s creepy.

Flash, my dog, loves his ball. Nothing gets him more excited than the off-chance that I’ll play a bit of fetch with him. Usually the ball stays out in the back yard, but occasionally he brings it into the house- where, of course, he immediately loses it.

I knew that he’d brought the ball in, and I felt like playing some fetch with him- so I said, “Flash- get your ball!”. He immediately perked up, and started searching for it. He gave up in about thirty seconds- I imagine he’d decided that I actually had it. I didn’t, though- but I’d seen it in the other room…

So I said, “Hey, I don’t have it- is it in the computer room?” His ears shot up- and he immediately ran into the computer room, found his ball, and ran back out with it!

Lightnin’, that is one smart pooch! He obviously listens closely to everything you say. :slight_smile:
Booklover: You sure have a smart kitty. It sounds like she is very sensitive to potential dangers. I hope you rewarded her handsomely afterwards. :slight_smile:
When I lived in Hermosa Beach in 1968 we had a big, fluffy cat named Archie; he was 2 years old and colored like Socks. And over the Christmas season we acquired a dog–an all-black cocker-dachshund cross; a tiny puppy who could have stood in the palm of my hand. (Well, Archie could too when we got him in August 1965.)
My sister Janice, then 17, was the only person at home at the time; the puppy, named Duchess, was only a few months old. Archie detested her and would swat her if she got too close. She was dumb but loving–she even loved Archie although he did not appreciate that.
On this day, Archie happened to be sleeping on the back of a couch, facing away from the front door. You could not see his head, with the cat ears, or his tail or anything else identifying him as a cat.
An employee of the Humane Society knocked on the door; he was inquiring in the neighborhood about a barking dog. Janice said, “We only have a little puppy; she barks like this: [imitating puppy barks.]”
The man saw Archie asleep on the couch. He asked, “Is that its mother?” If Archie were awake he would seethe at this dumb human’s dumb question…
When we were kids and lived in L. A. City, an employee of the city Department of Animal Regulation approached the door. My parents and my sister–then 7–were on the porch with our German Shepherd/Mastiff cross, Zipper–still a puppy but quite big already. The man said, “We have received reports from this neighborhood about a vicious dog.” Just then Zipper ran up to the man, his tail wagging, and stood up with his forepaws on the man’s chest, and trying to lick his face. The man asked, “Is this the vicious dog?” You bet. Zipper was vicious as a buttercup!
I know a girl named Sheila who had a young cockatiel. She and I were at her parents’ place, with the bird, named Babe. He was standing on the washing machine, and flew across the kitchen, and tried to land on the (vertical, of course) curtains over the kitchen window!