My rat girls Bettina and Cookie are my comic relief. They have a perpetually happy-go-lucky attitude. Bettina loves it when I take her out of the cage and sit down at my desk with both arms out and hands placed on the desk. She will run down one arm, back up the other, dive into my shirt, look back out, and repeat. The amount of fun she gets out of this simple game makes me giggle.
Cookie loves to snuggle. I’ll cradle her against my neck and say, “You’re such a nice girl!!”. This makes her do her happy-chatter so hard you’d swear her teeth were going to break off.
My cat Emma does this thing where if I’m sitting on the couch, she’ll jump up and walk casually across my lap. As she does so she’ll suddenly collapse against my chest and look up at me like, “Oh, look, I accidentally fell on you. I suppose this would be a good time to pet me.” The “accidentally-on-purpose” way she does it always gets a laugh out of me.
My dog is really happy all the time, but he’s somewhat stupid. He’s a big dog, but he thinks he can fit his whole body under a tiny little round decorator’s table. It gets knocked over all the time, but he keeps doing it.
At night, our younger cats get the ten-o-clock-crazies. Our apartment is kind of circular; if you kept making right turns, you could go from our bedroom onto our porch into our living room, down our hall and back into our bedroom. And this is what Jelly and Goldie do, over and over and over and over, at breakneck speed, reversing direction occasionaly. Every now and again, though, one of them will stop short, and because we have tile floors, the other will have to take a flying leap to avoid a collision. Cracks me up every time. And if a collision does occur, I laugh even harder!
My cat drinks out of the faucet in the bathroom. To make sure he gets a chance to take a drink, the second he sees you heading in the direction of the bathroom he runs at breakneck speed through the apartment, between your legs as you are walking and up into the sink, where he is curled into a ball to make sure that you cant fit your hands in there until he has decided he is no longer thirsty. I would be annoyed by it, but when you turn the faucet on and he starts lapping at the water he purrs so loud it sounds like the refrigerator is broken or something. How can you be mad at something like that?
Cats in bathrooms - that reminded me of another story.
My inlaws used to have a big orange sack (read: cat) named Fizban. Their bathroom door did not quite latch closed. Seems one of Fizban’s favorite things to do was to brazenly bust in on you when you were on the can and stare at you in utter fascination as you did your business. The first time this happened to me I was totally shocked, but I couldn’t help but laugh.
Mr. Spock sits up and begs when he wants to be petted. Since he’s a 28lb flamepoint cat, this is quite a sight. He also loves belly rubs - once the sitting up has captured your attention he’ll flop over on his back and expose acres and acres of soft white belly fur - it is difficult not to give in and rub the belly. And he snores, too.
I caught him sitting up and begging toward the hockey jersey hanging in my office. I told him if the jersey came down and played with him, I was leaving.
You mean there are people out there who can use the toilet without an escort of the entire feline population of their house? I really think my guys are afraid I’m going to fall in, be flushed away, and then they’ll be shit outta luck when it comes to being fed.
I have no pets, but my girlfriend has two cats. There aren’t enough electrons in the universe for me to post their antics. But one had me cracking up so hard I thought I was going to die.
Cats, you see, tend to seek out unusual spaces to nap in or explore. They especially like boxes.
One day my girlfriend got a FedEx package that was maybe 16122. It opened at the 2" edge. Belle figured that hey, it’s a box, right? Of course she could fit into it. If her head would fit, then… OK, her head would fit. If she could just… A little more, then…
Ah, screw it. Just walk around with the box on your head and no one can see you, I guess.
Every day when I get home my dog greets me at the door like I’m the Best Owner in the World. She smiles and rubs against my legs and jumps up and down. Then I tell her to go get her baby. She runs like hell for it, grabs it and begins what I call her “victory laps”, where she runs through the kitchen, out the door on the opposite end, through the living room, around the coffee table, through the front hallway, and into the kitchen. Repeat until suddenly struck by hunger.
Or sometimes when I’m packing her bag with her stuff to go somewhere, she gets all excited and gets “the baby” and runs around the house, smashing it into the floor so it squeaks. The more squeaking, the more excited she is. It is hilarious.
Also sometimes when she’s excited she just wants to put something in her mouth. Some times she’ll grab a big mouthful of kibbles, then realize she’s not actually hungry and have to spit them out. She kind of goes “pleah pleah” and they fall out. It’s funny but I try not to encourage her since it makes a big mess.
When she plays in the snow she has a ton of fun. One time I saw her take a flying leap into a snowbank and deliberately land with all four paws pointing straight down so that she was buried in the snow practically to her neck, then wriggle and squirm until she could get free. She also loves to roll in the snow and have snowballs thrown on her back. What a weirdo.
We have a pug. Every once in a while, she does something we call, “going pug-crazy.” Pug-crazy consists of running around and around in a little circle at top speed, so fast that you’d swear she’s just gonna wipe out (and in fact she has, a few times), while “talking.” The “talking” isn’t barking, and it’s hard to explain if you’ve never heard it; it’s a sort of excited whining and chuffing. In pug language, it probably means, “ohmigodohmigodohmigodohmigod!!”
Anyway, it’s hilarious. She usually does it when something really really exciting happens, like when people she knows come over. She used to do it when I came home from work, but apparently that’s not all that exciting anymore.
This was my former music teacher, who I was visiting one night a few years back. Pascal is the teacher. Picture him with a heavy French accent. Gizmo is a shitzu.
Pascal is sitting at the dinner table, having a drink. Gizmo is at his feet, then sits up and begs.
Pascal says “What do you want? Do you want zee dog biscuit? I cannot get zees for you, you see, because I do not have my slippers. What should I do?”
Gizmo cocked his head in puzzlement, trying to work out the Frenglish. He then scurried off, little legs a-churnin’ like no one’s business. A few minutes later he returned, with a slipper in his mouth. He drops it in front of Pascal and begs some more.
“But what eez zees? You only bring me zee one. Where is zee slipper number deux?”
Gizmo was puzzled again. He thought for a minute, then scurried off, legs a-churnin’ again.
As he made his way back to the kitchen with zee slipper number deux, I can only imagine what was going on in his little head: “Give master the slipper, give master the slipper, give master the slipper, give master the slipper, OOH, living room!”
And he veered off into the other room. The slipper was never delivered.
My brother went on two long postings, and his fiancee/now wife was very lonely. So she went to the pound and got two mutt doggies, one a puppy and one a four-year-old. Bella is a sleek looking greyhound-ish shepard mix; Lester (she didn’t name that one) is a cross between a beagle, a basset, and a sasquatch–a giant hairy low-slung guy.
But he was horribly abused and is timid as a mouse, and barks at Mutant Beagle volume right next to anything that upsets him–like me visiting, or the baby crawling (we cover baby’s ears), or anybody making sudden movements.
Bella jumps although she’s being cured of it, but otherwise she’s quiet. She is also a dominatrix exhibitionist, who humps Lester to show him who’s boss whenever he gets out of line. Yes, she humps him; nothing happens since both are fixed, and AFAICT they’ve never tried to mate. Lester just looks bored. Once another, larger dog named Rosie came over with a human friend and Bella became a lesbo-dominatrix-exhibitionist, quickly showing her who was boss. Rosie walked right out from under her but they all became friends, playing in the backyard all day.
Bella never bothers the baby aside from the occasional lick, but she will take unanchored little toys away. Lester immediately rats her out, running to my brother and barking and turning to her. Toy gets taken away by brother, Lester gets ass whipped by Bella for squealing. It’s hilarious.
And oh yeah, every night they have what I call the Two Minutes Hate–they’re lying down near each other and then they suddenly raise their heads and growl and bare their teeth at each other and tangle for a little while, then it’s all over. And Lester usually pins her. Weird dynamic.
Mollie was a codependant rotweiller/doberman mix. Bill was a tabby. Bill would suckle on Mollie. It would have been cute if weren’t so, uh, disturbing.
Two cats: Zippo, a large and black, and Phoebe, small and tortoiseshell.
Zippo will lie on his back with his belly exposed. Phoebe will come over to investigate, standing at an angle to Zippo. Zippo will bat at her with a paw. She’ll be on high alert, batting back but not touching him. After a few moments of this, without warning, she will do a standing jump on his head and chest. They’ll wrestle a bit, and she jumps off, in case he is going to get up. But he doesn’t, and the scene repeats. Then, without warning, he’ll jump up and chase her into the bedroom, and Phoebe takes off like a shot. Zippo never catches her. Somehow, words don’t quite do justice to this game, because it’s hilarious to watch!
I have too many to post, but one of my favorites is when Pixel does his spectacular leaps. Something will startle him or he’ll be in the middle of a game of stalk-and-chase with the other cats, and he’ll spring up 3+ feet into the air. He’s quite the acrobat and usually strikes a dramatic pose just before he begins his descent.
