Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
Pets!
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Gillie (the one I photograph) - We decided at the start of COVID that we needed a young dog to hang with our son. We went to a sketch-ass meeting at a gas station in the middle of nowhere to hand over some cold hard cash for our little half-Akita/half-German-Shepherd puppy. “What a big dog!” you might say. Except, as my husband likes to say, “there’s another half in there.” He’s only 40lbs at 2 years old.
Ellie - My cousin’s wife’s friend’s friend posted on FB about a 7 year old dog whose owner had just died and needed a home. No one wanted her because she was extremely shy and nervous with new people. But I’m very patient, and she’s been with us seven years now (and is elderly, and hates having her picture taken)
Charlotte - At my first week of my first big-girl job, one of my co-workers said she had a kitten and I needed that kitten. I told her that no, I did not need that kitten. Two days later she shows up IN MY OFFICE with a cat carrier with that kitten. Had to tell my new boss I had a kitten under my desk. He said that was a bad idea. I said I agreed. Anyway, she’s 15 now. (Fun Fact: I have never chosen a cat for myself)
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We picked Olaf because he was kind of shy and hesitant. And, our daughter decided that meant he was like her, so we should give him a good home.
So we did! He’s definitely not shy or hesitant with us anymore.
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I saw Bear the magnificent beast you see pictured in a Suggested for You Local Cat Rescue Group. He was all black at that time. Had gotten over a case of mange. Is FIV+. Has a wonky eye and a snaggletooth and after I met him I learned he snore purrs like an old man eating chili and that’s how I knew he was mine.
Sagan, I adopted for my partner when I knew our dog Bell was old enough to tolerate a cat. And he was a dog person until he also discovered he’s also totally a cat person when I taught the boys how to sit on command and fetch whenever they want to play. After Bellhound, we now have his and theirs cats and it’s wonderful.
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Sable showed up at the door one day and said she wanted a home. She was too thin, infested with bugs, and injured. She was also extremely affectionate. She got food, water, a box to hide in, and petting. She was still there the next morning (which was a Monday) so she went to the vet.
She got defleaed. her injuries treated, and given a physical. She wasn’t microchipped. She came home that day. No shelter or animal society had any all black, lost cat notifications so she found her home.
She’s a very smart girl since 6 weeks or so later she gave birth to a single kitten, being too malnourished to carry more to term. Or even show that she was pregnant. The vet had no idea either. She knew she needed a home to give birth to her baby so now I have Sable and Shadow, her little boy who’s twice her size.
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My cat Salmon passed away at 16 in 2007, when my kids were 8 and 6. They were devastated (as was I) so we went to the local animal shelter to adopt two kittens - one for each of them. They picked two out and named them and when we went to do the paperwork, the shelter said they didn’t allows kittens under a year old to houses with children under 10. Soooo kids were devastated all over.
We went to Petsmart since the ASPCA has an adoption thing there and got Piggy and Luke (originally named Alexander and Napoleon), who had been fostered and were 8 weeks old. We just lost Luke earlier this year, but Piggy is still with us.
In March of 2021, my coworker brought home a mommy cat with four babies from the golf cart barn at work. I didn’t want another cat, but ended up with another cat. Lizzy is a skittish little joy
️ She was the only one my coworker couldn’t find someone to adopt. -
All the black cats (Janeway, Pike, and Sisko) spent the morning throwing up. Got some meds and are sleeping them off.
Burnham decided that since everyone was sleeping she might as well too, even if she didn’t throw up. (We think it is because she isn’t related to them, so whatever got them, possibly a vaccine reaction?)
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@Tez In the majority of cases, we didn’t pick our animals. They just sort of… happened to us, whether we wanted it or not, and that’s not unusual with cats in the Philly area.
Pavel and Ivan my husband and I adopted intentionally when we first moved in together well over a decade ago. He chose them from the high-kill shelter in our area because I kept crying every time I thought about “picking” given how poor their live release rate was at the time.
Our late cat Nikolai appeared one very, very late night after the haunted house we worked at closed and a drunk girl from the bar across the street almost got hit by a car trying to walk back to her apartment. (Her friends were assholes and had refused to walk her home even though she clearly should not have been unattended and she lived in the direction we parked.) After we got her to her door, a greasy, skinny, flea-bitten cat literally came up to us and went “Meow??” with the Puss-in-Boots big eyes. We figured we’d clean him up and find a rescue to take him. Being the height of the 2008 recession, no one would take him except animal control and we didn’t have the heart for it, given their terrible survival rate. He became my most favorite cat ever and, much to my heartbreak, died from pancreatic cancer in January.
Boris and Yuri came to us when Nikolai got out several years and a house later. We set out humane traps to catch him and ended up taking multiple cats in for TNR in the process. They were the ones who were strays, not ferals, and had clearly been housecats. We managed to find Boris’ owner, who was moving and refused to take him back. She encouraged us to either keep him or just leave him outdoors because he was a runner anyway. (Legit, fuck her.) Yuri we eventually rehomed to good friends because he just couldn’t settle in with our dudes, but for several years, my husband and I were the only people that Boris would ask for pets, frequently while growling the entire time we were petting him. We tried rehoming him and failed.
Our late Michael kept showing up at our doorstep for weeks, yowling to be let in. We would occasionally feed him. When our next door neighbors, who had a broken window on their house for over a year, complained endlessly that he kept getting into their house, they drove him off somewhere about two miles away. He came back. They decided that rather than fix their window, they were going to try to kill him. We gave up and just opened the front door and he walked right into our house like he’d been trying to do for weeks. We tried rehoming him multiple times, but he was a biter and kept getting brought back to us. He passed away unexpectedly several years ago, apparently from a heart defect the vet never found.
Jane Pawsten was another neighborhood cat that walked up to us one day, half-starved and mewling pathetically. The good news is she was microchipped! The bad news is her owners hadn’t agreed to release their contact information. We spent weeks with the microchip company contacting them and contacting them with no response, before they finally agreed to give us the original shelter’s name. The original shelter sent humane officers out to their property and found it empty. Apparently they’d moved out and deliberately dumped her outside instead of bringing her back to the shelter, and by that point we had her for almost two months. The shelter was willing to take her back and try to adopt her out again, but she’d settled in faster and better than any other cat we’d ever had in the house.
Our dog Tybalt was a “surprise” from my mother that she didn’t tell us about until he was on a transport truck from Missouri. I’d wanted an Old English Sheepdog for years and one came up in her rescue group, so she decided to adopt him for us - before we’d closed on our house, while we lived in an apartment that didn’t allow dogs. He had to live with her for six months until we moved in. He’s the best dog ever, but believe me, I was absolutely livid that she pulled that stunt. She’s worked with rescues for years, so I thought she knew better than to adopt a pet for someone as present and how badly that usually goes. I was wrong.
Benny we adopted because I wanted another sheepdog and most rescues with sheepdogs don’t want to adopt to people with unfenced yards, let alone city-dwellers. But Benny came from a rescue that handles the worst of the worst cases, we’re experienced sheepdog owners, and experienced animal rescuers. They loved our application and I loved the fact that he was listed as good with cats, which was super important to us given that we have four of them. So I’d say we picked him based on a) breed temperament and characteristics b) the rescue’s willingness to adopt to us in particular and c) having the patience for cats.
So of the… nine pets that have lived in our house for various amounts of time during our decade and a half together, we chose three of them. The rest, well. They really did happen to us.
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This was a truly lovely read. Your animals really did.
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@junipersky said in Pets!:
This was a truly lovely read. Your animals really did.
The list above did not include the FIV+ cat we found a home for, the litter of ringworm kittens I hopped a fence into the yard of a halfway house to rescue, the grungy and ear-infected pitbull I plucked off the streets of West Philly and got back to his dad, the beagle I chased out of traffic…
There’s a reason there’s a running joke in the family that I will look at any one-eyed, three-legged, mangy, flea-bitten, tumorous, ill-tempered furball on the planet and be like, “BABY! I am your mother now.” and nurse it into the best health of its life.
But leave me in the general vicinity of a plant for too long and it will shrivel and die. I’ve managed to kill a cactus. More than once.
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Ever since I was a child, I’ve sat down in the cat shelter and waited for a cat to join me, curl up, and fall asleep in my lap. That’s how I know I’ve found the one.
Except for one weird tortoiseshell cat who came out of nowhere and walked in with me one day while I was bringing in groceries. She didn’t have a collar, and she just seemed to think she had lived with us all along. There were no missing cat reports in the area, so she joined the family just like that!
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I don’t know, I saw pictures of Braum and his brother, and they looked so close to identical. I’m not even sure what made me pick braum, because I picked him before meeting him, but it was the best choice. He’s the best boy.
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How did you pick your cats / dogs. WHY?
Chester came from Long Beach.
Norman came from Inglewood.
I don’t remember WHY I got Chester, except that I had just gotten my 2nd COVID shot, and it all seemed to make sense at the time. He is the dog of my heart, so it was clearly meant to be.
We got Norman because our CKCS passed away, Chester is very much MY DOG, and my husband was feeling a little lonely and jealous. So now we have a potato dog.
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@KarmaBum Inglewood always up to no good.
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Lost mama was found. (Her name is Miss Mouse).
A swift drive an hour away to get her.
She wakes me up at 3:30 yelling. She had gotten wedged between the litter box and the toilet. Get her unwedged. She doesn’t want me to stop petting, but at 4:30 I go get her some food. She eats and settles down.
I go back to bed.
Come in at 8 am.
Three babies are there all dried and nursing.
Hour later another is born.
Two hours later realize another baby is breech and isn’t coming out. With some intervention (my shelter directors giving instructions via video because neither of them can leave their kids to come help) baby is born, but doesn’t make it.
Miss Mouse has 4 perfect little babies and she is a GREAT mama.
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So, I have this dog.
She has opinions.
And she is ridiculous.
She was very smol. Mother and laptop available for size comparison.
She had a truly enormous family. 13-14 puppies, something insane like that, and she was the clear runt. Her brothers liked to pull her around by the tail and it was very rude. Her owner lived a number of hours away, so at first all we had were videos to pick from. There was one for each pup, but this little monster kept photo-bombing, bouncing around for attention and generally making a nuisance of herself. She was the last of the litter to be chosen, possibly because she was a headstrong little shit far, far, far too smart for her own good.
She is now 12-ish and has life threatening seizures, so there’s no knowing how much longer she’ll be around, but no one has properly informed her that she’s an old lady now.
It’s also really hot, so she’s shedding madly.
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@kalakh She is perfection. Also, have some ridiculousness in exchange.
If anyone knows how to reboot a dog, that would be aces. Benny seems to have crashed.
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@Aria Shake a treat bag, that usually how you cause a force-start.
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@kalakh Has your vet checked for a serious calcium deficiency and looked at your little old powder puff’s thyroid function? I assume yes, but decided after a mental tug-of-war to post this anyway because my dog, at age 15ish, started having seizures that traumatized everybody (including the cats) about 3 years ago and our vet found out something-something-thyroid was draining her calcium to horrifically low levels and after a 3 day visit she was sent home with temporary anti-convulsive medications and orders to give her 2 Tums a day.
Two. Fucking. Tums.
You’ve likely already had this looked into but I couldn’t sit back and not suggest it, so hopefully it’s not rude or overstepping bounds or looking like I think you/your vet don’t know what they’re doing.
She’s a cutie pie and these photos of her made my morning, so thanks
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@eye8urcake said in Pets!:
@kalakh Has your vet checked for a serious calcium deficiency and looked at your little old powder puff’s thyroid function? I assume yes, but decided after a mental tug-of-war to post this anyway because my dog, at age 15ish, started having seizures that traumatized everybody (including the cats) about 3 years ago and our vet found out something-something-thyroid was draining her calcium to horrifically low levels and after a 3 day visit she was sent home with temporary anti-convulsive medications and orders to give her 2 Tums a day.
Two. Fucking. Tums.
You’ve likely already had this looked into but I couldn’t sit back and not suggest it, so hopefully it’s not rude or overstepping bounds or looking like I think you/your vet don’t know what they’re doing.
She’s a cutie pie and these photos of her made my morning, so thanks
I’m relatively certain that’s one of the things that were checked a few times, but I’m afraid it’s not easy to confirm or to test again (and don’t worry! I deeply appreciate things like this). They’re definitely stress related seizures, though, they have all had extremely clear triggers with the exception of one a few Christmas Eves back, but we think that was the result of a considerably long walk + flashing house lights. Unfortunately, one of those triggers is going to the vet (lol, of course), and the last time we took her she started seizing about five minutes into the trip, ended up having something like twelve over the course of an hour or two, and ended up at the pet hospital for two days. They’ve got worse, with expanded triggers, since she first started having them, but that was quite a few years back (she was…7? I don’t remember).
She’s got a very nice traveling vet now, and on her current medication regimen hasn’t had one since, so I’d mostly just be worried about the blood draw.
