Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
Pets!
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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.
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Another foster for our rescue has a pregnant mama giving birth RIGHT NOW.
And since I mostly (except for the sad traumatic ending) missed my Miss Mouse giving birth, I’m watching the live stream avidly.
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@junipersky said in Pets!:
Another foster for our rescue has a pregnant mama giving birth RIGHT NOW.
And since I mostly (except for the sad traumatic ending) missed my Miss Mouse giving birth, I’m watching the live stream avidly.
A change of your name to KittyDoula just might be in order soon.
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Kittahs… a video from 2 years ago and a picture from this morning:
https://imgur.com/gallery/wR1cWjm
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My favorite pet supply store owes me 3,730 reward points and since mama kitty is eating 6 cans of high quality wet food a day, I’ma gonna need them to give me those points before she eats me out of house and home!
types karen like email but it is done with the best of intentions
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This morning, Benny and I were playing a rousing game of Crazy Dog, which mostly involves exuberant wrestling and an attempt at viciously murdering both of my hands for daring to tussle his face fuzz.
In the middle of said game he freezes completely still, gazes up at me with big, soulful brown eyes full of sweetness and love, and right as I start making cute noises and lean in to kiss his snoot…
Sneezes right in my face.
Twice.
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@Aria That is DISGUSTING but also I am fascinated by the edited gif. It is distracting me from everything you said. I keep watching as the dude turns and the line on the edge of his face blurs and disappears.
