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Pets!
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He is a glorious floof. What’s his name?
they | them
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@moth His name is Benny…
AKA Big Ben, Benny-Bens, Mercedes-Benz, Benjamin Button, Doofus, Creature, and “What the fuck are you doing NO!”
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@junipersky said in RL Peeves:
When we ask, “Why did you love this cat?” Please tell me what the cat DID that you enjoyed. Don’t just tell me it felt like they chose you. That doesn’t inform me at all, and honestly makes me wonder if you will cope well when they might be shy living somewhere new for a bit.
Now, that said, sometimes God does intervene so that a particular animal goes with a particular person. My pot babies where shy af and had hid for every single person who entered that room. The first person they ever came out for after going back to the shelter was the woman who adopted them.
OKAY GUYS. I WANT TO KNOW. How did you pick your cats / dogs. WHY?
I picked my idiot boy after being SUPER DETERMINED to get a fluffy kitten and finding out there are no fluffy kittens with an hour and a half of Boston.
So I drove an hour and forty minutes to see him, found that he was the last of his litter at the rescue, was extremely shy and half-feral which is undoubtedly WHY he was the last–
–but he was very, very fluffy. He was very, very scared at all the noise. He burrowed into the nook of my arm and tucked his head against me. Nothing makes me more of a sucker than feeling like animals feel safe around me.
My other cat is a failed purebred breeding momma. My sister got her last kitten, and the breeder gave the momma to us at a discount, since she wasn’t having big enough / quality enough litters.
DISCOUNT CAT.
she/they
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@Tez I wanted a fluffy kitty and she was v pretty. Plus her foster mom said she was more cuddly than playful – she tended to cuddle a lot with her mom while her siblings played – and I also liked the idea of that.
AND SHE’S PRETTY.
When I met her, I honestly wasn’t even bothered at the idea that she might not immediately come up to me or whatnot. I grew up with cats, so the idea of cats being skittish around strangers seemed super normal to me.
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I was still grieving my old man and while I was walking by an adoption event and there were two adorable black cat siblings hanging out on the top cat tree ledge and while he was looking at me the boy cat fell off the ledge onto his head and then started to attack his own tail. So they came home with me.
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@Tez It was the start of Labor Day weekend, and I was heading out to do some errands. As I approached my car, I heard forlorn kitten cries. But I saw no kitten! I walked around the car, because I didn’t want to crush kitten, and eventually found the kitten: he had climbed up one of the tires and was hiding in the wheel well, crying sadly.
I went back inside, got some bits of cold cut meat I had, and sat down beside my wheel and lured him out. He was tiny and sad, and when he realized I wasn’t going to hurt him, he began throwing himself against me with desperate affection and shaking his little tail.
Obviously, I took him inside. “I’m not ready to have a cat,” I said. “I’ll take him to the shelter when they open up after the holiday.”
Three years later, he is my best and most fluffy boy.
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OKAY GUYS. I WANT TO KNOW. How did you pick your cats / dogs. WHY?
I had just moved to the city a year or so prior, and I was regularly bartending at a local dive/music venue when I got my husky. The neighborhood I lived in is like… right by the river. And it’s a pretty spot to run and be outside. So, I was complaining that all the people with dogs were making me jealous. (It was also one of the first time in my life that I didn’t have a dog.)
One of the women I bartended with had a family connection with a litter, and people kept flaking out on adopting the last puppy. I wouldn’t be able to drive to meet him for a week, but sure enough he was still there. He was way bigger than his sisters and I think maybe that contributed to people opting out.
And my other dog, I got a year or two ago through a rescue service. He and his brother were surrendered way before they should have been separated from their mother and they weren’t doing well. According to his paperwork and according to him, he is a full Rottweiler.
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@Tez Double post to say I got my tarantula from a guy i drove by in a garage who asked if I liked snakes as I walked by.
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I am HERE for this topic!!
We got Kiva because I kept asking Taylor to let us go visit cats. We weren’t really serious about adopting (literally, we had nothing bought in advance). We went in and Kiva was one of the “pet(s) on parade” wherein she was in the lobby in a special cage you could see into on all sides. When she came back into the greeting room with us she was obsessed with the toys. We fell in love with how she seemed to be fearless and playful. Ended up walking out with a cat. (Good thing the humane society had a little store with the basics so we weren’t totally unprepared!)
Lyra we got after Halo Animal Rescue brought her litter to my husband’s news room to be the featured pet of the week. She was the most adventuresome and Taylor fell in love. He asked the rescue to hold her for us. He came home (he worked overnights/morning show), and woke me up with, “Hey, I adopted a kitten this morning, you need to go pick her up.” I have never been awake so fast. I ran out the door ten minutes later to buy more cat supplies. I didn’t check when they opened and ended up arriving two hours before they opened. Since it would have taken me that long to go home and come back again I just sat in my car fidgeting. X.x
And of course, Calypso is our foster fail. I knew I was in trouble when she came with me to my sister’s wedding and fell asleep the first night draped over my head, and Taylor realized we couldn’t take her back after her falling asleep next to Kiva.
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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.
