The Litter Box

General discussion for pets.stackexchange.com. Pet pictures an...
Thu 17:01
What a gorgeous kitty!
Wed 15:34
Looks like when Theo rolls over to show off his belly, he's addicted to belly rubs and is constantly flipping over when I get near him and he suspects pets are coming
Mon 15:17
Black cats do have some interesting colors and patterns that can appear in strong lighting. My mostly-black boy has stripes that show up in strong direct sunlight
Jul 1 13:05
@JourneymanGeek And this one's adorable!
Jul 1 13:05
@Stephie this is such a good photo
Jul 1 13:05
Gotta stay cool! Mine are of course spoiled housecats so they're pampered with air conditioning and have been doing the opposite, sitting in the afternoon sun (when I don't close the curtains)
Jun 23 16:09
Fantastic photo
Jun 18 15:56
Mine will take anything fabric or anything vaguely box/basket shaped. So the couch, the basket of throws, baskets of laundry, a random shipping box, a plastic storage box I just surrendered to them (and the fabric that was supposed to be a blanket and is now just their bed)...
Jun 18 14:10
I just flip them onto the floor when I unpack shipments, and they get to the recycling eventually
Jun 18 14:10
The household cats here are particularly partial to the "lids" that Chewy sends on my cases of canned cat food to prevent damage in transit
Jun 18 14:05
@JourneymanGeek I was looking at a post on Reddit from someone who was asking about if they should get a cat and listing off the expenses. Almost every reply was someone telling them "don't waste your money on cat beds, they'll use anything but"
Jun 18 14:04
@Stephie That sounds about right for Hamster! He's a little troublemaker
Jun 18 14:03
@Stephie He'll be 10 in December
Jun 16 16:54
Right now he seems pretty chill, he's lounging on the couch with his foot stuffed under the cushions
Jun 16 16:54
good news, the vet was able to call Saturday and got a prescription ordered for him that I was able to pick up at a nearby pharmacy same-day. So we're into the two-week initial period with it, after which I'll give him a "grace period" again and see how we're doing
Jun 10 13:33
Sadly I was supposed to have a "virtual visit" with his vet yesterday to get him on some meds to hopefully help fix things, but she got sick and had to go home so it's pushed out to Saturday :(
Jun 10 13:32
I thought he was doing better so I gave him a little "morning grace period" this morning as a test. He immediately lost it by spraying my desk chair when I took him off the desk.
Jun 10 13:31
I'm kind of reaching my wits' end with one of these cats. The older boy has been spraying (anxiety) for a while, I've been trying to work him out of it but nothing has helped yet.
Jun 9 17:54
My "special" orange cat kept me up very late a couple of nights ago when he decided to help himself to the other cat's "special treats" and downed at least four times the other cat's normal dose of a prescription medication.
Jun 2 13:38
He looks so comfortable
May 29 21:44
Beautiful!
May 28 15:26
doing so = getting her fixed, she showed up in winter and we lived in the middle of nowhere and 30 minutes from the nearest vet on a good day
May 28 15:26
Polydactyl, oddly, is a dominant trait! So once you get one you start to get more of them. We introduced a polydactyl female who wasn't fixed, and were a little late doing so, so she had three kittens. Two poly, one male calico
May 28 15:25
Then of course torties/calicos need one red and one black gene, both on X, so a male calico will be XXY (or chimeric), giving them a very low rate of occurrence
May 28 15:24
We're just about at that in the house, between myself and my housemate there are four gingers, one of them female
May 28 15:24
They tend that way. Boys only need the one gene to be orange while girls need two, so it's about a 20% rate for ginger girls
May 28 15:06
As far as cats go, we did get some of the nice "weird" options. We had a few ginger females, a small run of polydactyl, and my previous cat was a male calico born in our basement
May 28 15:06
Yeah, we just oddly attracted a bunch all at once. The cats were from a litter dropped off by my aunt to be barn cats (one got sick, came into the house to recover, and refused to leave), and then I think we just specifically went for the dog that had it too
May 28 15:05
I haven't had a pet like that since!
May 28 15:05
I had a perception that heterochromia was more common than it is at the time, we had the housecat, another outdoor cat, and then the dog, all at the same time
May 28 15:03
(tbh we probably adopted him because of the heterochromia, I had a heterochromic cat at the time)
May 28 15:03
supposedly, if a Dalmatian (maybe dog in general?) has a blue eye, they're blind in that eye, and Dalmatian-specific if they have an all-black ear they're deaf in that ear. Ours had both those things, so the breeder tested both before selling him
May 28 15:02
True, the breeder did sell for show dogs afaik (I was ~10-11 when we got him), did lots of testing on his breeding dogs, and our dog's litter was the first one off a brand-new sire
May 28 15:01
(He was supposed to be papered but the paperwork got lost in the mail and a litter is required to be registered before they're born, so...)
May 28 15:00
Meanwhile our actual-breeder but unpapered Dalmatian was one of the smartest dogs I've known, had his eyesight and hearing tested before we bought him, and even with the arthritis he developed due to being caught in an illegal fox trap overnight still lived a good long life
May 28 15:00
If memory serves, the stud was killed before the litter was born, again, by running straight into a moving vehicle
May 28 14:59
I'm pretty sure he outlived his litter mates too, who also all chased vehicles head-on
May 28 14:59
We actually tried for months to keep that idiot dog alive, he had a pin in his leg and deteriorating issues with his jaw that ultimately reached a point where we had to put him down because he just had no quality of life
May 28 14:58
And no idea what caused it! Ours seemed to be generally fine other than the part where he chased our neighbor's pickup head-on
May 28 14:58
@JourneymanGeek Both parents had been hit prior to the litter being born
May 28 14:57
They were very strangely predisposed to chase cars that were coming at them
May 28 14:57
That litter had the weirdest "genetic anomaly" I've ever encountered: Every single one of them (including ultimately the parents, and surprisingly it took a couple of times for each of them) died by being hit by a car
May 28 14:57
As in dog :)
May 28 14:57
Reading the question that got bumped up by a spammer about "adopting a purebred dog" and it reminded me of the backyard breeder lab we had when I was roughly a pre-teen
May 22 14:44
we did at least have one more orange kitten in the fosters last year who did get adopted out, but we each ended up keeping one of the three total there
May 22 14:43
My housemate apparently favors the orange ones a bit, of the four orange cats in the household three are hers (the third being Fatty's sister Lux)
May 21 13:40
May 21 13:40
Fatty's jaw also shifted, but he's got less range of motion (he also didn't pop his jaw partially open before the vets could do it), the hope is now that it's no longer wired up he'll slowly regain range
May 21 13:39
May 21 13:38
The button boys got their buttons removed Monday and have been recovering well. Hamster's jaw shifted and his nose is crooked now but he has a good range of motion (and most important, he's alive)