Yes animal cruelty! You know, fun torturing your household pets. Rubber band on the tail… tape on the ears, that sort of thing.
Last night I took a palm full of catnip, crushed it up and then rubbed it into my littlest dogs back. He became VERY popular with the kitty!! MMBwaaahahahah!! 
Ever torture your animal in a unique way and then think, “Wow, that is just BRILLIANT!”?
Oh, yeah!
The guy I used to date had a big ole gray boy cat named Squid. Squid was all boy. Liked to bite and scartch and pounce. Tough guy, see?
Squid, however, was not without his Achilles Heel (or duclaw, if you will). Squid hated long, drawn-out, high-pitched notes, like somebody going, “Wooooooooo” in a scary falsetto for more than thirty seconds.
It drove Squid bananas.
One evening, he was inching his way along the windowsill in the kitchen directly over a sink full of dishes and soapy water. Bad Squid. Not supposed to be anywhere above the counters in the kitchen.
So I turned to the cat and went, really loudly, “WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
Squid teleported off of the windowsill, right into the foamy water and dishes.
Man, that was mean, but we just about died laughing.
Long time before he got on the windowsill again.
Not really cruel but my cat has this game she likes to play that I have called door.
Basically She would come up to the door looking like she wants in but when I open hte door she will retreat just out of my reach. If I move twords her she moves away just enough so I can’t get her. If I go back inside she will go right up to the door again. Normally I would be able to chase her or distract her and get her in - sometimes she would win - but it took time either way.
We don’t like her going out at night and it was getting late. I decided that I didn’t want a long drawnout game of door. So I opened the door and she retreated. I removed the lower glass pane in the door and broght in inside with me. She went right up to the door and I popped through the hole and grabbed her - boy was she supprised, and upset that i cheated.
We sneak up behind the girl-cat and put things behind her, then back away, make a noise from across the room, and she turns…then WHAT THE HECK! HOW DID THAT GET THERE? as she sprints off down the hall.
Best for this is small dolls or stuffed animals. She went nuts when the woolly mammoth almost got her…
I must, of course, mention when my ex-husband took his black cat, the day after said cat had eaten some chili and…um…FIERCED in the litterbox (Rule 1 is never sneeze in an open headset mike…rule 2 is NEVER feed the Zeeep chili) he took the cat and very carefully painted a white stripe down his back with white frosting, then said “Look! A skunk!”
Zeeep was disamused. We washed it off him, of course, but he didn’t like that, either.
Corr
I used to drive my cats mad with catnip, to get them in and out of rooms and so forth, but now when they get a whiff they look excited for about two seconds and then develop an expression I can only describe as “hang on, if we go on like this I’m going to end up outside again…”
It was fun while it worked.
When our cat yawns, I like sticking my finger inside (across) his wide-open mouth.
*yawwwwn Gurk-yrk!
GLARE*
My mom used to open both ends of an empty chip bag, then put it on our poodle like a doggie sweater. Crinkle crinkle . . .
I do this too. Cat dosn’t glare; he just goes with the flow and gnaws on me for a while. Apparantly, I taste good; He loves to eat my toes, too.
Don’t know if it’s torture (at least, not on the cat. It gives mom something fierce of a headache), but Cat and I like to chase each other. Upstairs, downstairs, across the loving room, and back again, whereupon he will hide under the couch until he hears me running away, and then the chase is on once more! Repeat, ad infinutum, with a 180lb lad on not-so-sturdy flooring and you wind up with lots of noise, and one very jumpy cat.
<<Upstairs, downstairs, across the loving room, and back again, whereupon he will hide under the couch until he hears me running away, and then the chase is on once more! Repeat, ad infinutum, with a 180lb lad on not-so-sturdy flooring and you wind up with lots of noise, and one very jumpy cat.>>
This game is more fun when played between two people of mutually attractive genders.
Corr, who doesn’t play that with her cats <eg>
Oh, I do that to my cats too-the finger in the mouth when they’re yawning-I got the idea from this message board, believe it or not.
The only one I won’t do it to, however, is Noel, because of her gum condition-her teeth bother her and that’s not fair. Misty just naws at my fingers for a minute.
Hehe… I do that to the dog… a rather large, for the breed, shelty. Only she’ll look at me and yawn and I will stick my whole hand in her mouth and grab her by the lower jaw and shake her head around a bit. Then I have to wash my hand because its usually a bit foamy by that time.
There’s nothing worse, than faking the throw.
We sic the dog on our cat, Boris.
Put Boris down on the ground in front of dog. Stomp foot. Boris takes off down the hall like a bullet. Dog follows (bonus points here: the floor is hardwood, so Fido has to scrabble to get some momentum going).
At the end of the hall, Boris stops. Fido stops. They touch noses and go off to their next chore on their to-do list: Boris to see if any kibble has escaped the dish, Fido to sniff another cat’s ass.
And, yes, we don’t have a TV. How can you tell?
We make Kelsey the dog into the Lord of the Dance. We hold him up so that just his rear paws are on the ground. Then, we kinda bounce him up and down so he kicks his legs, and voila! He is Michael Flatley of the terriers.
Also, when there are dogs on TV, he runs up to bark at them and try to bite off their heads. We pull at the leash connected to his harness just as he jumps, and it throws him off balance. He falls and hurridly scrambles to get up to bark at the dog again. It’s pretty funny.
Poor dog.
You know those coat hangers for pants? The ones with this two little clips at either end? See what you do is clip one end to one ear of your dog and then the other to the other ear. Then you jiggle it around so that it looks like your dog’s ears have a life of their own. I’ll have to post pictures.
This one is second-hand, and possibly apocryphal, but I know the folks who did it, and they’re fully capable of doing something like this… anyway.
They used to take small potato chip bags, and put them on threads, and use these to lure the cat around the house in an intriguing (to a cat) game of cat-and-potato-chip-bag.
They were playing this one evening, when they were called away. They didn’t want to end the kitty-fun, so they decided to tie one end of the thread to a vane of the ceiling fan, so as to keep the cat amused for hours, as the potato chip bag went round and round in circles.
When they left the house, the cat was sitting beneath the fan, watching the potato chip bag go round and round and round.
When they returned, the bag was still orbiting, the cat was gone, and beneath the fan was a little pile of kitty-puke.
Not really “cruelty” since he does actually get a treat as a result, but a little dab of peanut butter on the tip of the dog’s nose = endless entertainment.
We had this little ferret who had a habit of biting your sock or the hem of your pants. So when she grabbed on, usually when you were sitting on the couch ignoring her, you lifted up your foot so she was hanging by her teeth. Eventually she had to let go and fall with a thump. But she kept coming back for more.
Long ago and far away the evil ex and I had two kitties who were (to put it mildly), mentally deficient. Guiness (the stout-colored male) seemed to have a really bad case of cat pica. This critter would eat the most unlikely objects. One x-mas he managed to get ahold of some really pretty red ribbon. Imagine my suprise when cleaning the cat box after that indulgence… gift wrapped kitty shit, all that was missing was the bow. To try and cut some of the kitty odor I burned incense sticks, and oh my goodness how Guiness loved those. Maybe he thought it was good roughage or something. The morning after his indulgence he paid…
picture this poor cat with all claws extended, gripping the sides of the litter box with all his might, evacuating what amounted to needle sharp spinters. The horror.
His sibling Manther the panther (or the slug, depends on how you viewed her), had to compete with a crawling 13 month old child. Her favorite napping spot was under the dining room table in a patch of sunlight. The 13 month old child would silently creep up behind her and then let out the most high-pitched screech imaginable. I’ve never seen anything move so fast. I think she may have broken the sound barrier a few times.
I’d better stop before I get started on the dog sories.
The people I used to rent a room from had a basset hound; I would blow into the dog’s nose and watch her lips flap.