He stands on a table or the back of the couch, shelf, mantle. Where ever.
One unnerving sound or happening and he flies to the beams. It almost happens too fast to see.
Occasionally you get a nice howl/meow on his way up.
Meeko follows everytime.
When I was a kid, we had a cat named Ignats (Iggy) who, when he wanted to be let into the house, would climb up the the back screen door, and peer over the inner door curtain. He scared many guests, thinking there was a 6’5” cat trying to break in.
The things that our cairn terrier does aren’t particularly remarkable – she goes to the door and pokes at it to go out for her walk, she lies down next to her food and water bowls and gives us little barks when she wants one or the other, and she does this little dance when she wants to play.
What is a little more remarkable, at least to us, is that she is 13 years old, and she didn’t start doing any of these until she was around nine…and they all showed up over the space of about two weeks. It’s like she had a suppressed enhancement that suddenly got jarred into working one day.
Our 10-year-old Russell Terrier Milo finds lost golf balls at our neighborhood golf course. We moved next door to a golf course three years ago and since then he has found in excess of 500 golf balls. I give most of them to the high school golf team and sell the rest on Facebook.
It all started inadvertently when we were out walking the course. He went into the rough and came back with a ball. I gave him a treat and since then its become his mission in life. He can even find them when there is six inches of snow on the ground. A dog’s nose is an amazing thing.
Or nine cats in a trenchcoat.
Sorry about your puppers, pullin. It’s so hard to let them go, isn’t it?
Lessee–big hairy cat Captain Jack (named for both Sparrow and Harkness for his permanent eyeliner, polymorphous perversity and casual attitude toward gravity) LOVES to go on car rides. He has a big canvas collapsible pet carrier with windows all around and I put it in the back of the Subaru, roll down a back window so the breeze goes by him and he’s perfectly content back there, totally relaxed and having a good time. Most of his trips in the car end up at the groomer, and he loves her too. She says he’s perfect for his bath, comb out and shave job and enjoys the entire process, only needs muzzled when it comes to getting any mats out of his coat. Even when he has to go to the vet–which is at least once a year because he’s diabetic and they have to check him out on the regular–he’s completely relaxed and fine with the new place and whoever comes to tend to him. He’s a super laid back kitteh.
Shoga is the Smart Dog–she understands a lot of English and pays attention when you tell her things. She’s learned to differentiate different toys and goes to get the one you ask for if she’s in the mood. She’s a fraidy cat though, if she hears a loud noise outside, especially at night, she’ll be spooky about going out to pee for a good long time. She’s just now getting over New Year’s, for example, but the regular gunfire in this neighborhood is holding her back. She’s also randomly scared of certain men wearing hats, nobody’s ever been able to figure out why though. She can’t be talked out of it either, when she’s taken a fright to certain friends (guys who LOVE dogs, even) and they try to sweet talk her into being friends she absolutely will have nothing to do with them no matter how hard they try. It’s weird.
Kosh is a Chaos Dog, he’s loud and opinionated and goofy. He’s also incredibly affectionate and loves to suddenly jump up next to me on the couch, barrel into me full force and pins me down to lick and nibble my ear. I call it “having a bad date” because it flashes me back to high school instantly. He’s figured out that his frantic, high pitched barking at Fedex and UPS trucks while he’s in the house makes me mental so he’s taught himself diversion–he grabs a favorite toy and he shakes it and gnaws it as hard as he can to keep his barking under control. Nobody taught him that, he figured it out on his own but I absolutely reward him for it. He’s an excellent companion on car rides and can handle a six hour road trip with aplomb. He’ll occasionally lean into the front seat to give me an ear lick though. He’s afraid of nothing and nobody lol.
My Sister is here, at the moment. She brings her dog when she comes. Pippa the dog is a medium sized, stout dog. With longish legs. The adoption agency said she was part Chihuahua. They must’ve been on crack cause this dog ain’t got none of that.
Maybe a large rat terrier was in there somewhere.
None the less she’s a sweetheart.
But you cannot sit by her, or get on the floor with her because she’s a pusher. She pushes with her head, her body, her butt, her paws until she moves you. Then does it all again.
I’m not sure how my sister sleeps in a bed with her. I’m thinking you’d end up on the floor during the night.
Pippa pushes all my pets around. Bayliss don’t hold no truck with that. He never snaps, bites growls or barks but he gives her the ‘look’
Betsy the beagle just lays on the floor and lets her push. The Chihuahua-shits yap and generally run around in a tizzy trying to dodge her.
The Siamese never get near her. The garage cats tolerate her pushing for awhile and then get up high, away from her.
My senior cat, Allie, does this with water. She’s also fond of hopping up on the edge of the tub for a drink when I’m in there (she doesn’t do this to my husband), and frequently flicks water off her paw into my face (pretty sure that’s intentional, the little brat). Her predecessor, Felix (RB), thought tub water was great, too, but used his face to drink like a normal cat. My junior cat, Buddy, seems to find the whole tub thing rather worrisome.
Both Buddy and Allie believe that I need an escort in the bathroom (they’ve occasionally teamed up on that). Felix didn’t, apparently trusting me to handle that on my own. He’d even get a bit irritated if someone walked in on him using his litterbox. For a sweet cat, he did an impressive “do you MIND?” glare. He’d even come in from outside to use his box, then go back outside. I’m pretty sure he could tell time, too. When I’d tell him what time I would next open the door for him (either specifying the clock time or giving the interval), he’d quit pestering me until the specified time, then would be right there to go out again.
Buddy has an amazing talent for winding up in the center of the bed, even when he’s “sharing” with a human or two. How a 13 lb. cat manages to push around adult humans like that…
Our old dog, Maggie (now deceased 
) had a way to tell you she needed to poop–come up, sit on your foot, look you soulfully in the eye, and fart. Works all around!
I was once taking a bath in the presence of two kittens. The kittens had only recently been introduced to living indoors, and hadn’t seen a human taking a bath before.
They prowled on the edge of the bathtub with considerable curiosity. Soon the inevitable happened, and one of them fell in. I scooped him back out promptly, and Wet Kitten ran off into the adjacent room.
Shortly afterwards, the other kitten fell in. I didn’t have to scoop her out. She was in, and then instantly she was out again, and running off after her brother. I’d swear that she made no contact with me, or with any portion of the tub. She just levitated back out again. (Yes, she did get wet.)
Does it help if they take their hats off?
I once terrified my parents’ new-at-the-time rescue dog by coming to visit them and coming in the door wearing a backpack. I don’t know whether I reminded her of somebody, or whether she thought the backpack was part of my body and didn’t know what this Creature was. Once I got the backpack off I was able to make friends with her.
When I was a teenager my parents had several indoor/outdoor cats who were allowed as much outside time as they wanted when it was light out, but would sleep in the basement every night. My parents first trained them to come in for the night by whistling for them, but somehow also eventually trained them all to present themselves to be let in by flicking the outside house lights.
Wait, is that why I can hear Linden walking around but not Poe? I never really thought about the fact that the extra toes’ claws probably can’t retract the way the other toes’ claws do.
How many extra toes does he have? Linden has 3: one on each front paw to make a “mitten” and a dew claw on a back foot that I wasn’t aware of before the vet pointed it out when he had a kitten visit to the clinic.
My late kitty Sandstone never once tried to take over the bed.
Again, he was a cat. Don’t tell me that’s not weird.
My late kitty Imhotep loved going to the kennel. She figured out if she looked cute and co-operated she got treated like royalty.
My first kitty Ambrose turned his nose up at steak juice but was caught chewing through plastic to get to angel food cake.
Nope, once she’s decided a man is evil she won’t change her mind. The first time it happened it was a friend who came over and he was here all afternoon with his hat off but she simply would not go anywhere near him. He ended up staying here for a while and no matter how many times she saw him she’d slink off and refuse to get anywhere near him, even when the other dogs were swarming all over him. And it’s not every man with a hat, either, just some and not others and I can’t figure out for the life of me what the trigger is for her. It’s only men, and wearing a broad brimmed hat that does it–never a woman and so far no men without hats. She’s an oddball.
My female childhood cat Pussywillow could turn a circular one-would just grip in with both paws and turn. We kept finding her (during nighttime storms) wandering around the house outside the bathroom we put her in (she’d stand on the sink). So we watched the door one night, and yep grip turn click, and out she strolled.
When my cat Will was about 8 or 9 years old, he suddenly became interested in having sex with one of the female cats, Remy. He had been spayed as a kitten and Remy, a few years older than he, was fixed, too. This would usually happen on the bed. I walked in on them many times and got the “WHAT?” look. Will would mount her and bite her scruff but there was no actual sex going on. He would hump for up to ten minutes and then give out a deep sigh. Remy never really seemed to mind but would occasionally smack him if she wasn’t in the mood. As the years went by, Will didn’t even need to hump her, he just needed to be touching her. After Remy died, this behavior stopped even though there were two other females who dearly loved him and spent lots of time grooming and cuddling with him. I’d never seen anything like it.
Here’s the part where I’ll bring everyone down by talking about my dog, Badger. We just had to put him to sleep last Friday. What was unique about him? Well, he was three-legged, for one. But he’s unique amongst all the pets I’ve lost over the years in what an outsized presence he was in our house, despite being only a 55 pound, completely medium-sized animal. My wife has gone to bed, and the silence in our house is something I’ve never experienced before. He apparently even in his sleep could manufacture noise to a decibel level that completely masked the normal sounds of the night in this house that I’m just now experiencing for the first time.
I don’t like it. Godspeed, Badger. If there’s something next, I hope it’s badass and I hope you have four legs again.
Awww, go run ahead, Badger, I can tell from here he’s a goodest boi. He’d love my Widget, another fuzzy little herding dog mix, he was such a character. I’m sorry you lost him.
@Pork_Rind, I am so sorry! And what a beautiful dog!
Gormless George the Maine Coon is a water loving cat. He plays in it every chance he gets. The toilets are always closed to stop the splashing, and their water fountain lives on the catio because we can’t have it in the house.
Hubs brews beer which requires an ice bath for finishing and he has a terrible time keeping GG from jumping into a ice filled ice chest and happily splashing around because he likes feeling the water rippling through his fur.