My cats don’t seem to have consistent fears…except for air freshener or room spray cans…but they have these weird temporary fears that are so amusing. Today, for instance, Tweak is afraid of two of my pillows on the bed.The same two pillows she walks on everyday to climb up onto the window ledge. Today, she is totally and completely freaked out by them. I guess I didn’t help matters by, when I noticed her being a scaredy-cat, picking her up and tossing her onto the pillows.
I just went and tested her. Three hours later, she’s still freaked out…but only by one of the two identical pillows. Perhaps I should be more worried that the pillow is actually possessed and that she’s not just being weird. But now that I’ve reversed which pillow is in top…she seems much happier.
The easiest way for the cat to overcome this is invite a friend over who HATES cat and have him announce that he detests and despises cats. Then the cat will deliberately come out to annoy your guest. Note: this only will work if the company HATES cats, they can sense if someone is faking
This is kind of amusing but it would be downright funny if “Hoover (the cat)” was afraid of vacuums
My dog is has no problems with thunder or firecrackers, but she hates the sound of gunshots.*
She is also afraid of vacuum cleaners, ballons, yoga balls, guitars, and her biggist fear of all is skateboards. I have no illusions that she will protect me from anything. When there is a knock at the door she will bark and then hide behind me.
*I work in a theatre that often has guns firing blanks in the shows. She sometimes comes to work and when the scenes with the guns are rehearsed she will cower behind me growling. If I am near the guns she will run and find someone else she trust and cower behind them.
My dog has decided to be deathly afraid of some bird in the desert who starts singing at 4 am. She whines and pants and either wedges herself behind the toilet or tries to dig a hole in the carpet by the bed.
My cat used to be afraid of popcorn bags. When I would shake the popped bag to distribute the butter, he would do the super-puffed-up Halloween cat pose. I found this so hilarious that I would chase him shaking the bag whenever I made popcorn. Eventually he figured out the popcorn was not going to attack and now he is no longer afraid. Damn!
I also had a greyhound that was afraid of everything. Loud noises, soft noises, distant noises, near noises, newspapers, strangers, Spanish-speaking people, the list went on and on. The one, though, that was really inexplicable was his fear of toddlers. When he saw a toddler approaching, he would completely freak out, rearing up and twisting his head back and forth in an attempt to escape his leash and run away. He was a good head taller and four times as heavy as the average toddler. Was he tormented by toddlers during his brief stint on a Mexican racetrack? We never knew.
My do (female Australian Shepherd) will not enter the basement. When try to force her, the hackles rise up and she growls. I don’t know why-perhaps the basement is haunted (house was built in 1923).
So is my boy, but he may very well have been beaten with a stick. He is adopted and had been a stray for quite a while, perhaps several years. Anything that resembles a stick must be slowly put down while he watches before he will approach; otherwise he trembles and tries to hide.
Our cat’s afraid of the ceiling fan. Any ceiling fan. It started in the first apartment where she lived with me, which had 12’ ceilings so the fan was really high and really far away from her. Didn’t matter, she was terrified. New apartment, lower ceiling, fan over the dining room table. That helped a little, but she’d still watch it apprehensively. Now our new house has 3 ceiling fans, including one over our bed. She’s getting used to them since they’re on nearly all summer. But every once in a while we’ll still see her look up at the moving fan, head sort of moving in a circle as she tracks the fan, before she scoots out of the room.
I adopted her as an adult so I don’t know what might have happened to her in the first ~4 years of her life. But I have a hard time imagining what could have happened with a ceiling fan.
My dog is weird around the roomba, but I don’t think she’s afraid of it attacking. I think she’s nervous that it’s another animal establishing dominance on her turf.
She circles it, checking it out, and about the third time it makes her move out of its way she starts looking worried and stalking it from the back. She’s bitten its backside several times and pulled the dust bin off of it at least once. That last seemed to satisfy her temporarily.
It was still just as uppity the next time though, only then she got cautioned when she started to stalk - which she seemed to interpret as favoritism on my part. Now she always looks a little hurt when I take its side over hers.
My dog is afraid of the garden hose, and of being submerged in water. The dog I had growing up used to love playing in the garden hose, but Zoe wants nothing whatsoever to do with it. When we took her to the doggie beach she’d go out in the water if we went with her, but she looked miserable and confused. She loved running up and down the beach with the other dogs, but would get stand at the edge of the water and whine when a dog she was running with went out into the water.
When we give her baths we put her in the tub and dump cups of water over her to wet her and rinse her off. That she doesn’t mind at all.
My dog gets really nervous in the car for no good reason. We’ve only had him for a few months, but I put him in the car all the time to get him used to going to nice places (in other words, not just the vet’s.) He pants and pants and pants and pants and shakes and then sometimes he makes the saddest little howl. Then he’s absolutely thrilled to get out and see my dad. Then he obediently gets back into the back seat and starts to pant and shiver again.
He freaked the hell out at his obedience class last week, but that makes more sense - it’s in the middle of a Pet Smart, so not only are there dogs and people but there’s also food and gerbils and parakeets and stuff. But he howled and shook and panted and made monkey noises through the whole class, so we all had to yell over him.
