With so many animal lovers here in the Dope, I got to thinking early this morning that maybe we can help each other out with any small (or not so small) behavioral problems we may be having with our critters.
I normally have pretty well behaved pets, but here recently I have run into trouble with my Gordon Setter bitch Kharma. She (as all my dogs are) is a house dog, and has been house broke since she was a puppy. But several weeks ago, I went on a week long vacation, and thy stayed with a friend of mine that has outdoor kennel runs. She and Nick became kennel dogs for that week.
Since coming home, I have been awakened three times in the middle of the night by what can only be described as a thick green cloud filling my bedroom; Kharma has gotten up and crapped on the floor, then gotten back in bed as if nothing happened. (I know it’s her because Nick is always firmly in his usual sleep spot, cuddled as close to me as he can get.) The first time, I made excuses, it was diarrhea, so MAYBE she couldn’t wait… but the other two times, there is NO excuse.
I have not changed their food or schedule, and the last thing we do before bed is let them out to potty.
Any suggestions as to why, or how I can stop this???
Ewwwww! Sorry, no advice since I dont officially own a dog.
My SO has a cat that does weird things:
Scratches the hardwood floor beside its food dish before/after eating
“talks” (all the freakin time)
Will not cover up his mess in the catbox but will scratch around it trying to activate it? (it’s a littermaid)
I believe the scratching beside the food bowl is a leftover instinctual thing, simulating ‘burying’ the food to hide it for later consumption. Both of my cats and my little Papillon dog do this… the Papillon will actually go find a scrap of paper and place it neatly in her bowl, over the food LOL.
The ‘talking’… some cats are just more vocal. My female, Ruby, talks a lot more than the male, Charlie.
One of my cats does both the food-scratch thing and the litter-box-scratch-all-over-the-place-but-miss-covering-the-turds thing. I feel better knowing someone else’s cat does it too. I just figured he was an idiot.
Now if I could keep him from kneading my testicles every time he sits in my lap. I swear he’s decided that our newborn is too loud and is ensuring I can’t make more.
I have two cats, a brother and sister, Zebulon and Jezebel.
Jez is super-affectionate (bizarrely so, compared to other female cats I’ve dealt with) – Zeb will come around meowing loudly and want his ears scratched, but doesn’t want to be picked up and doesn’t want to sit on or next to me when I’m lying on the sofa.
When it’s time for bed, though, he’ll accompany me upstairs, meowing and frolicking, then hang out on my stomach while I’m reading, and often spend the night curled up next to me (with Jez on the other side).
Plus, he’ll come around for some ear-scratching when I’m on the toilet, which is also upstairs, and paw at me, sometimes jumping up in my lap while I’m peeing.
I’ve never dealt with this problem, so this is a bit of a WAG. It sounds like she just got into the habit of pooping in the middle of the night since in the kennel she could poop whenever she liked. The best fix I can think of (it involves messing up your sleep cycle, sorry) is to get up in the middle of the night, shortly before when she’s been pooping, and then taking her outside. Once you get to where you can reliably get her to poop outside instead of in your bedroom, start stretching out the time before you let her out, say, 15 minutes at a time. Eventually (hopefully), you get her to the point where she’s going out to poop at the same time she used to.
My new kitten, Minnie, is very gassy. I have eliminated Greenies from her diet and that has helped, but she still does have some noxious odors emanating from her bum…
Her belly is huge and rock hard, she has been de-wormed, three times and now we have her on antibiotics for her loose stools. I am really hoping that the abx work and that we don’t have to change diets, but that may be our next step. The vet said she thinks the big belly is just gas, let’s hope so. I don’t mind changing diet, but I have to do it for both cats since they are free feeding…
The other cat, Luna, loves cheap cat food. She came to me eating Purina, and I have tried switching her to better stuff, but she isn’t all that interested. I have her up to Avoderm, but she won’t go near the grain-free stuff I really want her to eat…
She has an addiction to corn. I figured this out because she goes nuts when we eat those blue corn chips. She will stick her head in the bag and pull out a chip and eat it like it was candy. Corn is not good for cats, so I try and steer her away from it, but she loves any cheap diet made with corn and her Greenies have corn as well…
The vet is fine with the Avoderm, they just don’t want her fed Friskies or another cheap food.
Forgot to add my weird animal behavior. My cat Callie is declawed. She likes to “pretend claw” the inside welcome mat (she makes motions like she’s clawing it, but since she doesn’t have claws she just rubs her paws on it). That’s not the weird part. The weird part is she seem to think she has to be sneaky about it. I’ll be in the living room, and she’ll come in and make a beeline for the welcome mat. If I look at her, she’ll stop dead in her tracks and try to act casual until I look away. Then she’ll make a mad dash for the mat and “pretend claw” as fast as she can for a few seconds, then run away. I could care less if she paws at the welcome mat, and I’ve never yelled at her for it. I’m not sure why she seems to think she’ll get in trouble if I “catch” her.
My cat (originally she was my wife’s cat but she’s adopted me now, too) claws the living shit out of our door mouldings. We’ve bought her I don’t know how many different scratching toys/posts, etc., to no avail.
She also has to have a covered litterbox because she’s an absolute poo flinger. Seriously, I didn’t bother to put the lid back on once not too long after we moved in together and there were turd marks 4 feet up on the wall 10 feet away.
My cat, Morty, pukes. A lot. Almost every time he eats. It’s not hairballs. It’s food. It goes in. It marinates for about 2 or 3 minutes and then …
*hurka - hurka - hurka - blech *… a perfect tube of barely chewed cat food, roughly in the shape of a feline esophogus and held together by cat innard glue or something.
It doesn’t seem to bother him too much. He generally goes back for a second helping and keeps it down. Other than that he poops and pees normally. He seems pretty happy and healthy. He bathes. He’s affectionate. He’s really a great cat – which is weird coming from me as I’m not a cat person at all.
It’s just the puking.
Every day when I come home it’s a game. Hi Morty, where’d you puke today? Oh hey, right in the middle of the living room. Thanks for making it easy to find anyway.
I feed him mosty dry food, indoor formula, with an occasional weekend can of the wet stuff.
I’ve not taken him to a vet for this, because, as I said, apart from the puking, he’s normal.
Jack, my dear-departed cat did that as well and lived to a ripe old age of 20 so I doubt you need worry about anything more serious than treading through a kitteh puddle.
My weird pet behavior belongs to my chihuahua, Isa. She has a licking fetish…particularly the tiled floor on the back porch and one of the living room chairs. I know it’s some kind of a comfort thing but sure wish I could break the habit.
I’m sorry, but isn’t this supposed be a thread about pets? It looks like its a thread about pets, but there’s no pics of the pets, and that’s a violation of the rulez, so it can’t be about pets.
I have a kitten named Courage who has suddenly become fascinated by the “magic fountain” in the bathroom. I, taking a leak, am that “magic fountain.” I go to the bathroom and he scurries in after me, climbs up on the rim of the bowl to watch the water works (he only stares at the water in the bowl and does not look upwards, BTW).
At first, I thought flushing the toilet would solve the problem. Nope, he just crawls into the bowl, until the water starts gushing in, then he backs out on to the rim. Peeing on his head (not that I did it deliberately, but I have to keep moving if I want to have a clear shot and on a couple of times, I zigged when I should’ve zagged) doesn’t bother him.
If I sit down on the toilet, he either plants himself on one of my shoulders and attempts to suckle my earlobe like some kind of demented parrot, or he curls up in my underwear. There’s no door on my bathroom (design feature of the place), and even if I tiptoe past him when he’s asleep, the moment he hears the sound of urine hitting the water in the bowl, he comes scampering into the room as fast as his paws will carry him.
I had a cat that would sometimes sleep on her head. I couldn’t figure out why she did that. Then someone told me cats do that when it’s gonna rain and sure enough without fail, whenever the cat slept on it’s head, within 24 hours it rained.
My mum’s cat TukTuk used to do this. We couldn’t figure out why. Was she sick? She seemed healthy enough.
So when we took her to the vet for another matter & she had to stay overnight, we asked them about it and they said they’d monitor her.
The next day we come back and the vet had a little laugh “She’s not sick, she’s a pig”
Where some cats will bite down on pieces of kibble to break them up and eat quite daintily, Tukky used to just wolf down pieces whole. And like a human over-eater, she was eating so fast that her stomach didn’t have time to send “full” signals to her tiny, tiny brain, so she’d over-fill. Then as the cat food slightly swelled when she drank or just as it came in contact with her stomach juices she’d, well, overflow somewhat.
Higgins is our year old yellow lab puppy and aside from routine behavioral issues, there’s one very odd thing he does that I’ve never had a dog do in all the years I’ve had pets. When he scratches around his mouth/jowl area, he scratches so hard, he draws blood. Weirdest damned thing. Right now he’s got five or six sores along his bottom jaw line and jowls that are in various stages of healing.
Oddly enough, even though they’ve bled, they don’t seem to bother him. He just beats the hell out of himself whenever he scratches.
Interesting. I never considered him to be particularly piggy when it comes to food, but what do I know. He always seems to leave a little in his bowl.
I was trying different things, like making sure his bowl was always full — and then the opposite, only putting a half a serving at a time. Although, when I started lessening what I gave him, the pukage did abate somewhat. It just doesn’t seem very nice of me to split for 10 hours leaving him with only enough for breakfast.
One of our older cats, Banzai, has a tendency to puke. But he doesn’t just puke… he always and without fail does it on carpet, or clothing, or the bed. We have, in the past, moved him onto linoleum/into the tub, wherever once he starts making his “hork, hork, hork” noise… and he will very deliberately run to the nearest piece of carpet/clothing/the bed to vomit.
Without fucking fail.
In the five years I’ve been living with him, I’ve seen him puke on linoleum only once, and I believe that was an accident on his part.
On the other hand, he does sit on command. One of our other cats, Baxter, does the “burying” thing. But only with scratching next to his water bowl, his food bowl for some reason doesn’t require “burying”. He does, however, fetch.
Here’s a general dog behavior question: When you scratch a dog’s belly, and the dog starts scratching, too, what does that mean? IMO, it means the dog has irrated skin, and scratching causes it discomfort. I say this because when my dog has healthy skin she loves to lie still when I scratch her tummy. When she has dry skin her leg starts going when I scratch.
