Hey, you’re back! I don’t think I was even around while you were, but your gas station story has got to be my favourite Dope thread, EVAR. Welcome back!
Hey, Master Wang Ka, did you get summoned by that other thread, the one asking specifically where you were? At any rate good to see you.
I have a cat a lot like yours. Here’s how it goes: Cat goes outside, eats grass, comes inside and throws up. Solution: keep cat inside.
Iteration #2: Cat eats houseplants, throws up. Solution: put houseplants in hard to reach spots; cultivate cacti.
Iteration #3: Cat eats plastic, throws up. Eyuuk. The puddle of slime with single leaf was bad, but the puddle of slime with plastic is worse. I don’t know why.
I do know this cat had a rough young life. She was rescued from stray-catness by a member of a fraternity, and spent the next two years living in a fraternity house. where she had to go through the uncertainty of being elected mascot each semester in order to be allowed to stay. (I don’t know whether that was the rough part or whether the rough part was before.)
And the peasants rejoiced (Yaaaay.) for the Master had come back amongst them.
Welcome back 
I have had bulimic a cat.
Feeding smaller portions several times a day may help. My bulimic cat would gobble up as much food as possible, whenever he was stressed.
I started feeding the two cats in separated rooms at different times.
They got around 2-3 Tablespoons of dry food at a sitting or 1/2 can of wet. (4 Tbsp is 1/4 cup) He’s get about 1/2 cup a day. He still had an occasional incident, but much less often.
Another thing that helped was giving him Petromalt™ or some other hairball medicine. Even though I rarely saw hair in the “gift.”
Good luck.
Oh yes it can. My wife had a cat that lived 22 years just to spite me…
Welcome back, Master Wang-Ka! I was just thinking this week how much I missed you. In fact, I was just saying to Scylla, who inadvertently let his membership lapse, that he *had * to stay, because you were no longer around. Of course, your being back doesn’t change the fact that he should stay, because he’s still the best example of a human, decent conservative (how’s that for an oxymoron?) that *I * know on the board. But I’m utterly delighted to see you back!
My friend has this [del]problem[/del] solution. Once she did the Heimlich on someone else, and they couldn’t even examine what he choked on, because it soon as it hit the ground, her yellow lab Margie ate the damn thing.
The circle is complete.
( Our dog - a lab- does the same thing, licking up the puke of hers or anyone elses.) I view it as a perk.
More tea, vicar?
Good to see you back. Your stories were part of the reason I started lurking around here in the first place.
After reading the OP though, I’m going to be saying “vlork vlork” in a Swedish Chef accent all day.
Vlorky vlork vlork vlork.
I clicked on this thread as soon as I saw your username, hoping that it wasn’t a resurrected zombie! I loved the story about you chasing the prosetylizing woman down the street in your underwear while brandishing a sword! Awesome!
My cat hornks (thanks, Dave Barry!) too. One time on top of the china cabinet. I had to bring in the ladder to clean it up. Yecch!
My grandmother had a dog who ate too fast and would vomit afterwards on occasion. She fixed the problem by scattering the dog’s food on a cookie sheet. The dog couldn’t take big gulps of it any more, but was forced to slow down by having to grab each bit individuallly.
Try it. It may work for you, too.
VLORK. Yup, that’s what he does. vuk, vuk, vuk, vlork.
Usually, mine will, prior to the first vuk, let out a particularly distinctive mmmrrrowwl to give his poor human a fighting chance of putting some paper down for him. (If I try to move him, he doesn’t throw up until later, usually in the middle of the night.) Poor kitties, puking hairballs all the time.
I started feeding my constant-vlorker a food that’s described as “for sensitive systems” by Purina One, and he is a much less constant vlorker. Not completely vlork-less, but nearly.
Hm. May have to look into that; I didn’t know there was such a thing. We’ve tried rotating her food; so far, results are only temporary. Near as I can tell, she suddenly realizes she’s hungry, charges into the cat room, and stuffs herself voraciously… thus setting the stage for a later vlork. Obviously a compulsive habit, acquired from the first year of life, when she never knew whether or not there would be food in the dish…
G-d D-mned Vlork!!! What’s worse, the d-mned cat runs to hide if you get up too fast to try to get paper under it (or at least get it to tile and off the rug) , vuking all the way!
Cold, slimey between-the-toes-Vlork is no way to start your day.
Welcome back!
Louie the Large sings a little song before the vlork. Sort of a ‘baby screaming in agony’ number, very popular with the kids.
The big question is - does one prefer stepping in the hot, squishy vlork? Or the chilly, lumpy vlork?
No cat I’ve ever met offered me the choice.
My dear wife had another cat when we got married, one Tigger by name. Tigger was a Mighty Hunter, and used to bring down one or two largish birds (grackles, usually) a week. For some reason, that cat always seemed to catch a bird on Saturday nights.
I know this because on Sunday morning, I’d stagger out the side door to go out and get the newspaper, and step in cold wet bird guts. Tigger had a habit of eating the bird, then carefully arranging the leftover parts in the correct anatomical order, right there on the side porch. In the middle would be the bird guts. Above them: the head. Below them: the claws. Flanking the guts on either side: the wings.
Damn showoff cat.
My husband makes a dish he calls “taco pie” which is basically taco fixin’s in a pastry crust. He made it last month but then got a flu bug and never finished the leftovers. I threw away a 9" X 12" baking dish-ful (absent one slice.)
Bean was apparently overcome by the tempting smells of slightly-bad taco meat which wafted from the trash can. She did something she hasn’t done in years-- she tipped over the trashcan and ate the whole pie.
The vlork which resulted was mighty, indeed. Honestly, I think I should have taken a picture. I know I would not have believed that that much vlork came out of that dog without having witnessed it with my own two eyes. “Oh, good show!” I said sincerely after she finished. I was deeply impressed though I’ve never had to shovel vlork before and I hope I never have to again.
Except that dogs don’t really vlork. They really more kind of ghack. Or at least mine do. Fortunately, not often. I took to keeping the hand-held dustbuster on the lid of the kitchen trash because they would tip it too often. Bad dogs! Very bad! I avoid putting anything that has practically been in the same room with food in any other wastebasket, since none of the others have lids.
Of course, not smelling like food is no guarantee. Austen, my Great Dane (Grey merle, with a beautiful stance, but given her blocky head and torso, I’m betting there’s a Mastiff or St Bernard in her not terribly distant ancestry), has developed great counter and table-surfing ability, and occasionally her choices are puzzling. The entire wrapped stick of butter was perhaps understandable, but why did she eat a bottle of calcium gel-caps? I mean, no shit, she chewed on the bottle until the contents were quite accessible and must have eaten a good many of the caps. This was a year or more ago, so apparently they didn’t do her any harm, but I’m darned if I can figure out WHY she did it in the first place!
This is all Toby’s fault. He’s the male Dane I got in Feb 2005 in hopes of keeping Austen company. I should have known better. Toby was HUGE - 160 lbs or so. He was the one of the mellowest dogs I’ve ever known, but I don’t think he was ever afraid of anything in his life. Austen, at 130 lbs, is afraid of most things, including toddlers and any animal larger than an insect that doesn’t show fear at her, and her way of dealing with that fear is to bark ferociously at whatever she’s afraid of. (This makes her an excellent dog to have in an urban neighborhood, since she sounds extremely vicious) When Toby arrived, Austen barked at him. And barked. And barked. And barked. For the better part of a year. Toby never was frightened - it wasn’t even clear if he noticed her at all. And so he took over as Top Dog without so much as growling or baring a tooth at Austen, because she was far too frightened to ever fight him. Occasionally she’d go to attack him, but she was so clueless that she’d attempt to seize his entire front leg between her jaws. You could see just as she was arriving that she’d suddenly realize (AGAIN) that once there, she had NO idea where or how to go on. Again, Toby never appeared to even notice.
So after a year or so, I gave up. I’d gotten Toby to make Austen happier, and instead she’d lost her position as top (and only) dog, and was much LESS happy. I went to the rescue from which I’d gotten both, and asked them if they could place Toby - he was such a sweetheart (and adorable, fawnequin, with one brown eye, one ice blue - what a mass of recessives!) that I knew they’d have no trouble finding him a home. And they didn’t. In the meantime, I’d also acquired (or perhaps re-acquired is a better word - he’d been my dog, but I’d given him to a family because they loved him, but then they had to move and couldn’t take him) Max, a 40 lb-ish Eskimo mix (hay colored, with a dark mask and eye-liner eyes - absolutely adorable!) who is very timid and doesn’t bark - he just hides or backs down. He wasn’t all that happy that Toby left - I think he felt that Toby protected him from Austen. But Austen mostly ignores him, because he’s obviously frightened of her, although I suspect he also has her number - he’s a smart dog. But the habits of long timidity are hard to oversome, and in this case, it’s just as well, as it prevents hostility. Still, they’re company for one another, and they don’t fight, so it’s all pretty good.
However, saintly as Toby was in many ways, he taught Austen some bad habits. She had never nosed open the kitchen trash until Toby showed her how. I mean, it had to be him, because Max simply isn’t big enough. She also wasn’t NEARLY the counter-surfer she became until after Toby arrived. A lot of it, I suspect, was sheer competitiveness; she used to skip breakfast occasionally before the other two came along. But once there was another dog in the house, every bite of food available was eaten instantaneously! Yet there’s never any food aggression, and never was. Go figure.
I have two cats whose vlork styles are as different as night and day. Stiggs the Elder Cat has the classic vuk-vuk-vuk thing going, but even though it sounds alarming it’s almost always a false alarm. So it goes vuk, vuk, vuk, vuk, KHU-CACK! Nothing actually hits the floor. Scary sounding, but I can sleep right through it since I know it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Pratchett the Younger Cat, on the other hand, is a prodigious vlorker when he puts his mind to it. He warms up with the Digestive Distress Call, sort of a “wow, wow, wow, yam, yam, YAM, WOW-WOW-WOW” noise, followed by a couple of vuk vuks, then the big old splashy VLORK! Sometimes he’s stealthy, though, and manages to put one onto the floor without the warning call. Somehow these always manage to be exactly in the place where my foot is going to go on the way to the bathroom in the morning–his aim is unerring, the little bastard.
Hopping to the toilet with a vlork soaked foot has to be the nadir one experiences to offset the zenith of funny leaping play cat goofball antics…