Literally snorted milk. Which is wild, because I rarely drink it, but we had bought some to make some holiday dishes and I had a glass.
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He’s not terrified on sight but he HATES the smell of fruit! He’s always interested in people food so because I find it funny I’ll let him sniff things I know he’s not going to like, and the first time I let him sniff a strawberry he ran out of the room and wouldn’t let me pet him for days. ACTUAL DAYS. (I let Jessie sniff the strawberry afterwards and she found it thoroughly uninteresting. She’s the cat who will lick hot peppers because they smell awful and that’s fascinating).
He isn’t as upset by other fruits but will reliably get offended by them, and at least once slapped the hell out of an apple core because it was close to some other food he wanted (see also: bread, pasta, pop tarts, or other carbs). They’re both complete weirdos.
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I’d like to introduce this forum to Princess Helene of Troy, my furry companion of the last ten years. She’s a working guide dog for the blind and therefore can’t really be considered a pet, but you’re never going to be able to take the “dog” out of a guide dog no matter how much training they receive! Fortunately she’s too well-behaved to try eating anything which would return the message “that’s plainly inedible”, but like your typical Labrador Retriever she’s never met a food she doesn’t like. Her particular favorites include watermelon, bananas, and hard-boiled eggs. Here she is posing for the camera as her princess status dictates.
Alt text: a shiny black lab sitting on the wooden floor.
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While I don’t personally have any pets, my parents have two cats, two of my roommates have a cat each, and my partner is caring for another cat until his owner figures out her lease, so everywhere I go there are cats. (Except on vacation. This past week has been entirely cat-free.)
I used to have a bad allergy to cats, and I still have a debilitating fear of dogs stemming from some childhood experiences, so for most of my life my pets were fish and bugs (my family raised praying mantises for several years). But the allergy seems to have faded, and now through a series of coincidences there are cats everywhere, and it’s wonderful.
(Still can’t be around unleashed dogs without panicking though. Whenever a dog owner says “oh he only lunges at you like that because you’re afraid of him, that’s what the problem is” I have to avoid that person at all costs, because they have a nasty habit of letting their dogs off-leash around me to “improve” things.)
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might as well share slinky here, honestly. he has beautiful gold eyes.
also he’s crime
this is after he got into our flour and the white powder looked like he had a fantastic time
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I just transcribed a few minutes of our birds’ chatter for your enjoyment.
Guy Peep: fart fart fart. FART. FAAARRRT. Whoop!
Lil Pibble: Beep. Cluck cluck cluck.
GP: Pewpewpewpew! KISS! kiss kiss fart.
LP: Trill beep cluck AWK!
GP: Peep kiss. Spaceship spaceship cluck PEEEEEeeewww.
Then they both decided to take a bath and got squabbling over the water dish. Even though there are 3 water dishes, if someone wants to bathe in one, the other has to have that one too.
Edit: I can’t spell the spaceship noise. It’s like the Enterprise boing noise combined with a yodel?
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It’s now been exactly one week since Tristan (still a kitten at eleven months) had his first-ever piece of slow-baked holiday ham, and he has had a similar radical rupture in his sense of time. He was already always trying very hard to be “helpful” in the kitchen, but now it’s totally impossible to make a sandwich or get a bowl of ice cream without locking him up first.
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I am fostering five kittens and delirious with joy. Ninja (black) arrived into my care last Sunday. She was raised in a house and is eight weeks old (and LOVELY; very purry, very social). The others arrived two days later. They’re strays about four weeks old (not fully weaned when they were found) that a random lady found weak and dehydrated in her garden. We think their mum was killed.
They are all getting on like a house on fire and Ninja is helping them learn to groom themselves properly, which is sorely needed (they’re mostly good with toileting, thankfully, but manage to get milk all over themselves every day and then leave it there).
Ninja is at the back. Princess is looking down; Dragon is at the back beside Ninja; Hero is at the front and Pirate is pale.
Princess on top of his (yes, his) siblings. I could rename him Prince but his attitude is so Princess-y I’m keeping it the same (and he’ll most likely get a new name when he is adopted).
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my cat learned how to open windows. i ain’t joking; i recorded a video and here are some screenshots (behold my amazing photography skillz)
by this rate she’s gonna evolve into a human by the end of next year. i fear for my life.
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The doorknobs in the house I grew up in didn’t have handles; they were spherical, metal knobs.
One day, when I was a child, I was assembling Lego in my room, and heard the doorknob jiggling violently.
“C-come in…???” I said, wondering who could have possibly been so angry and trying to figure out what I did wrong.
The door opened…slowly.
My sister’s dog was standing there.
Confused, I poked my head into the hall, but nobody had opened it to prank me. I was home alone.
I looked at the dog, who seemed very excited about her newfound skill. I was a bit shaken.
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My wife’s dog, Melba, came home from surgery today. She had a subcutaneous tumor removed from her belly. The vet said that he was able to remove all of it, and that it had clean edges.
She has a custom hospital gown that my wife sewed for her so that she can’t rip open the stitches.
The cat says that she smells funny.
This is Melba recuperating:
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We feed our dog dinner at 6:00. But she starts campaigning for dinner at about 4:45. She stares, unblinking, at me, scooting closer and closer and moaning. She pulls out every trick in the cute book: offering a paw to shake, bowing and putting her paws over her nose, rolling on her back, turning her head nearly upside down, all the while staring and moaning weirdly. And once campaigning has commenced, she will not let you pet her. She ducks her head away and shakes your hand off, and you know she is splaining that this is a transactional relationship. You feed the dog and the dog loves you, and don’t ever forget that this is how it works. And I confess that many evenings the psy-ops work on me and I give in at 5:30.
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Ah, the eternal war between my need for routine, and “gosh, the dog is being adorable right now”.
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When I was in high school, one of the endless series of pets my stepfather brought home was a Newfoundland dog, who lived with us for a year or two before being re-homed. The dog was enormous and freakishly smart and only had to see a human being push the big button mounted on the garage wall that rolled up the big garage door one time before figuring out how to jump up and smack the button herself.
She then spent the next year-plus trying to find new and innovative ways to open the door that led from the kitchen to the garage so that she could open the garage door and go out exploring.
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I have Pavlov’d our cat. We play a breakfast, lunch, and dinner bell so he only meows when the bell goes off. The downside is that it’s on a schedule so has gone off when I’m nowhere near home in like movie theaters when I forget to turn it off, and if the bell goes off by accident when I set an alarm wrong, he goes nuts at the wrong time.
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Verbing weirds language. In a good way.
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This is not something we have to worry about, thankfully. I put a treat on the floor and put a cup over it, and the dog couldn’t figure it out. She’s probably in the bottom quartile, which makes life a lot easier because she’s so easy to fool.
HA! Our budgies are Pavlov’d to the sound of Tom getting up in the morning. They mostly just mutter and grumble quietly until they hear his feet hit the floor above them, and then it’s all CHIRP SCREAM SQUAWK GET DOWN HERE AND FEED US RIGHT NOW.
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Too real! Jessie is very smart and James is very dumb, and he’s by far the easier cat in pretty much every way. (Although Jessie’s lack of a normal sense of fear doesn’t help).
Example: James got burnt by the toaster once and now he avoids it. Jessie, meanwhile, is running a long term scientific study on why the toaster only burns sometimes! (This study consists of sticking her feet in the toaster repeatedly and, you guessed it, getting burned multiple times.)
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My father’s dog, Max, doesn’t eat things randomly. Instead he takes the potential food in the mouth to taste it and check for parts which are unchewable. Then he drops it and then he takes it into his mouth again and chews it into small parts and spits them out once more. Then finally he eats it piece by piece. If in this process he comes to the conclusion “inedible” he doesn’t eat it.
He likes to sit on my father’s or my foot.
He has the tendency to run away when unleashed and to stay away for 45 minutes or an hour. This has become better, but it still happens. Once he came back bleeding all over. My father took him to a vet immediately. But it was nothing bad. It just looked serious. I wonder still what was the reason. Was it a cat? Another dog (unlikely)? Some wild animal? A thorn bush (unlikely, too)?
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