My kitty (Zumba of course!) is wonderful in almost every way. She is a two year old nine pound tabby I adopted from the animal shelter. She doesn’t scratch furniture or use the bathroom anywhere she shouldn’t or beg for food.
I love it that she always has to be in the same room I am in. Who said that cats aren’t social animals? She follows me around the house all the time. She isn’t always laying on me or underfoot but she is always within eyesight.
I love it that she will play fetch with me. She has these little gray fur mice that she will drop in my lap when I am sitting on the sofa. I throw it and she runs to get it and bring it back. She will do this ten times in a row or so before she gets distracted and stops.
I love the way she curls up on my lap in the evening when I watch TV. My SO says that if I am not home she keeps jumping up on the sofa and meowing until he puts our (mine and Zumba’s) TV blanket on the sofa. Then she curls up in it and waits for me.
My one problem is yearly vet visits. She is terrified of driving. She is okay in the create. She is okay when I put her in the car. The second I start driving she uses the bathroom on herself and starts moaning. It is awful. I live about 20 minutes from the vet and by the time I get there I am as upset as she is. And, when I get her home I have to bathe her which doesn’t make either of us any happier. If anyone has any ideas what I can do to help her I would love to hear them.
Well Zumba, my advice for the cat in the shat came back problem is to avoid feeding your animal for at least twelve hours before a vet visit. Yes, you may have a yowling critter bugging you around the house preceeding the vet visit, but the cleanup is going to be a lot less painful. I would also schedule your vet visits for the early morning if possible. That way kitty has been sleeping (hopefully) and all of this can be gotten over with fairly quickly.
If that doesn’t work a moderate sized cork my be your only salvation.
PS: Talk to your vet about some sort of tranquilizer. This may allow you to calm your frayed widdle puss just enough to get her to the vet without too much mayhem.
Oh, you guys are making me miss my pets! I can’t wait to go home at Thanksgiving and to lavish oodles of affection on them. Not that they’re not spoiled enough as it is…
Anyway, Romeo (a four year old lab-mix) lives for having his belly rubbed. If you’re sitting in a chair with your legs crossed, he’ll come and stand directly over your extended leg. If you don’t immediately start rubbing his tummy with your foot, he’ll start walking forwards and backwards so that his tummy is rubbing your foot. He’ll take lovin’ anyway he can get.
Coco, our late cocker spaniel-poodle mix, used to sing along with the theme to Jeopardy!. She wouldn’t howl at fire/police sirens like Romeo does, nor would she react if someone sang/hummed the theme song – it only happened during the final jeopardy round.
Bumper, our aloof and ornery 12 year old cat, has learned to sit when he wants cheese or a cat treat. Indy, our timid 9 year old cat, won’t eat anything other than regular cat food unless it is fed to him by hand. Indy’s a doll, though. If I forget to close my door before going to bed, I’ll wake up with him sitting on my chest staring at me, wait for me to get up. I miss them.
I have two cats - scaredy littermate orange tabby brothers named Pooka and Goblin, and one dog - a Norwegian Elkhound named Gizmo (who can be seen here with me on the People Pages.
The kitties are 10 now but still pretty rambunctious. They beat the crap out of each other at least once a week (no blood drawn, but fur flies). Usually this is at 3 in the morning. Pooka usually beats up worse on Goblin, and I used to break it up, until Goblin got in the habit of running to me whenever his brother got a little carried away. This would usually mean jumping on me at 3am. I wouldn’t necessarily mind being jumped on at 3 am once week or so, but, well, he’s a cat. So I stopped rescuing him.
My dog is very easy to live with. I attribute this to lots of training when he was young and, above all, consistency in letting him know what is acceptable and what isn’t. However, he has his idiosyncracies:
He has an eating disorder (at least this is what my friend, a recovering anorexic, calls it :)). He is the only dog I’ve ever come across that doesn’t snarf his food down immediately. Sometimes he’ll go a day or so without eating anything, which results in ETB - Empty Tummy Barfies. His favorite place to hack up stomach acid is on the Turkish carpet.
He is afraid of my floor. I had wood floors (well, technically a laminate, but you get the idea) put down in my condo a year ago, and he still slips and slides all over the place. It’s pretty funny to see a four-legged animal fall (and of course he knows I’m laughing at him).
I have a Jack Russell Terrier, 12 years old, who has the weirdest eating habits. We could never train him to eat all his food at once, so he just picks all day. He won’t eat unless someone is in the room with him. He won’t eat at all if my mom isn’t home. In order for him to start to eat he must bring me the blue ball which I must throw, he must retreive, I must throw, he must retreive, I must throw, and he must then place on the right side of his dish. The whole thing is repeated with the yellow ball, which is placed on the left side of the bowl. He will then eat about five mouthfuls of food. The coolest thing he ever did was climb a tree after a squirrel. The squirrel went up the tree and the next thing I knew Winston was sitting, looking pretty proud of himself, on a tree branch about six feet in the air. (He had a little boost from the car parked underneath the tree.) The thing that peeves me most about pets is that they don’t live as long as we do. My best friend lost her Cattle Dog, Sydney. Sydney was the “best dog in the world”. We will miss her.
Zen finally managed to slip Paloma the old wazoo today. After almost an entire year of pair bonding and three unsuccessful heats, Paloma has calmed down enough to be receptive to Zen.
Big Chief Zenster want’um pups! They haven’t made “the tie” yet, which is the only way that you can be completely assurred of fertilization. Still, this is a major advance over Paloma’s persnickety lack of receptiveness for the last year.
I’m still debating starting a thread about this, I’m ever so teddibly, teddibly happy.
