Cats

Runs For Fun said:
There's a cat house near me. They have literally dozens of cats just roaming around. They're all adoptable and you can go there just to visit them. Would definitely recommend.
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One is trying to adopt me lately, hanging out in the yard in the early evening when I'm opening up the windows again and putting in the sliding screens. I'm like "uh... help yourself to a spare bale of straw in the barn, pal... it's summer and the livin' is easy."

I'll possibly be tempted in October when the mice start trying to set up housekeeping in my kitchen yet again. A cat is not cheaper than an array of mousetraps but a cat is far more entertaining, and even its maintenance is more fun than trap-watching.

Still, I'm more likely to end up with a porch cat now than one that comes to live indoors. I'm also pretty sure my barn and its straw bales left over from gardening each year get used as temporary shelter on cold nights, for cats that have a home locally but cannot resist roaming around to see if there are better eats somewhere else... and sometimes get caught out in a snowstorm.
 
I dunno if she's my cat anymore, but here's a cat...

Cat.jpg
 
yaxomoxay said:
Let's start a cats thread.

My youngest cat pissed in my shoes last night. Not around it. Not over it. In them. When I went to pick 'em up to get ready for work, it was a pool of cat urine. That's how my morning started.
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When we got married my wife had 2 cats. I had never had a cat and had let my parents keep the dog we shared.

Everything was fine until about 6 months in when a stray started showing up in the evening. It was winter so the wife let him start coming into the garage at night. He was happy to go out in the morning and he would show up at night. So we decided to bring him inside and try to integrate him with the other 2. One was pissed and the other didn't care.

But one night he hopped on the bed and laid in the pissed one's spot. She walked to the foot of the bed and peed all over my feet.

-----------------------------------------------

We currently have 3 cats. My daughter's Ragdoll and the 2 boys. The 2 boys came to us a similar way. Some @$$hole dropped a pregnant mama kitty in our neighborhood right before one of those polar vortexes. There was no way she was going to survive out there, so the wife and daughter brought her into the basement bathroom and let her have the kittens. She had 5, but one was stillborn. The other 4 were fine, 2 calico girls and 2 tuxedo boys. We were able to find homes for the girls easily, but not the boys. Our other cat was in her last year, so we decided to keep the boys and my mom tool the mama kitty. Those boys weigh a combined 41 pounds. And while they are a little overweight, they are simply big cats.

Now the fun part is about to happen. Mom is in assisted living where she can have her cat. At some point soon she will be moving to memory care where she can't. While that has a whole set of problems, we are going to have to try to integrate the mama back with her sons. One is territorial as hell and it will be a battle.
 

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Herdfan said:
There was no way she was going to survive out there, so the wife and daughter brought her into the basement bathroom and let her have the kittens.
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So it's looking true that in the long run that "no good deed goes unpunished"... just the payback on this one is taking awhile to come around. Argggh! Meanwhile, sorry to hear about your mom's apparent decline in health.

I had a 20-pound black and white cat once that looked a distant cousin to the "boys" in that photo you posted. He was huge and all muscle and had taken exception to some of the vet exams necessary after an idiot left my shutters open onto a fourth-floor fire escape and the cat went exploring, got startled and fell about 40' to the ground. He had run back into the building and a neighbor had notified me so I took the poor thing to the Animal Medical center.

They gave him some antibiotics for a cut tongue, which I guess he had bitten severely as he was landing... and then with some difficulty they managed to subdue him enough to x-ray him for dislocations or broken bones etc., by which point the cat had about made grass skirts out of their lab coats. One of them finally popped my plucky monster back in his carrier and said "He's in better shape than we are, take him home."

He was one of the offspring of a then mama-to-be that had yowled piteously in the snow outside the courtyard level apartment of some friends of mine in NYC who were in law school at the time. One of them was away and the other let the cat in and stashed it in the absent guy's bedroom to stay cozy over the holiday, figuring he could put her back out when it got warmer outside. But the mama cat promptly chose my friend Pete's shirt drawer as a great place to pop out her babies. Heh. Everyone in the old college network who was in Pete's phone book in the city ended up with one of those kittens. They kept the mama and named her more or less as such, just so they could yell at her and alarm the neighbors: "Mother get the hell off the g'damn couch!""
 
Herdfan said:
When we got married my wife had 2 cats. I had never had a cat and had let my parents keep the dog we shared.

Everything was fine until about 6 months in when a stray started showing up in the evening. It was winter so the wife let him start coming into the garage at night. He was happy to go out in the morning and he would show up at night. So we decided to bring him inside and try to integrate him with the other 2. One was pissed and the other didn't care.

But one night he hopped on the bed and laid in the pissed one's spot. She walked to the foot of the bed and peed all over my feet.

-----------------------------------------------

We currently have 3 cats. My daughter's Ragdoll and the 2 boys. The 2 boys came to us a similar way. Some @$$hole dropped a pregnant mama kitty in our neighborhood right before one of those polar vortexes. There was no way she was going to survive out there, so the wife and daughter brought her into the basement bathroom and let her have the kittens. She had 5, but one was stillborn. The other 4 were fine, 2 calico girls and 2 tuxedo boys. We were able to find homes for the girls easily, but not the boys. Our other cat was in her last year, so we decided to keep the boys and my mom tool the mama kitty. Those boys weigh a combined 41 pounds. And while they are a little overweight, they are simply big cats.

Now the fun part is about to happen. Mom is in assisted living where she can have her cat. At some point soon she will be moving to memory care where she can't. While that has a whole set of problems, we are going to have to try to integrate the mama back with her sons. One is territorial as hell and it will be a battle.
Click to expand...
I don't understand people dumping cats off. How can you be so heartless? It makes me so mad. My parent's neighborhood seems to be a popular place for people to dump cats. Many years ago they took one in that ended up being pregnant. Unfortunately both kittens were stillborn. Poor cat mourned for months. There's now another one that started showing up and eventually found its way in to the house. He gets along mostly with three of their cats but not so much with the fourth.
 
Herdfan said:
But one night he hopped on the bed and laid in the pissed one's spot. She walked to the foot of the bed and peed all over my feet.
Click to expand...
OMG! My Jet does this kind of thing when he gets mad. The last time he did it was the last (forever!) time I cut his nails. He was so angry at me that he marched up on the arm of my chair and peed all over my arm before I knew what he was up to.
 
Herdfan said:
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.
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Plenty of dogs have actual jobs, including the breeds long used to herd cows or sheep. But some cats will also take it upon themselves to help you work, which usually amounts more to harassment than anything else. My cat Grace had all manner of chores she volunteered for in my studio. Quality assurance of my stitching was a favorite task, looking for loose threads from which to make mischief. This scrap quilt was meant for her, so she was giving it an especially vigorous round of QA.

GraceChecksQuiltQuality.jpg
 
I miss our cats. I told this story in the past (hopefully not this thread 👀), but we grew up with dogs and were highly offended when Mom brought home a cat. It was an indoor outdoor cat and had a short life, I never really cottoned up to it.

A decade later, with no pets the wife wanted a cat, we got two brother- sister barn cats with sinus infections, got them meds, yet they blew snot all over our laundry room before shaking it. My socialization complete, I discovered just how good a pet they can be and we got a third. Great pets for 17 years.

When they passed, we were moving back and forth between two residences (with the seasons), and decided it was not a good time to get new pets. Maybe eventually we will. This time the wife wants a teacup Yorkie. That remains to be seen. :) What I like about Yorkies, but not going to pay $1500 for one, is they are small but not yappy dogs, at least the ones I have met. :)
 

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