Be Excellent To Each Other

I do hail from the North, but have live in the South for years now!

I have a cat flap all ready and will fix it during the 4 weeks of baby leave\holiday I have.

Back on the cat

I bought one of these as I have seen it on My Cat from Hell and even the worst cats ended up liking it. They are expensive for a cat toy, but she was never that bothered with other toys. Also when it comes to replacement lures you can get 3rd party ones that are a lot cheaper

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bird-Interactiv ... B000F9JJJE

My cat loves it, she will jump 2 or 3 feet in the air chasing it. Recently I have found the toy outside as she gets it from the conservatory herself and plays with it. The other day I was sat in the conservatory reading and she jumped up on a table, picked up the lure in her mouth whilst dragging the rod behind her and dropped it at my feet!

My wife has just discovered that if her iPhone rings with a certain ringtone, our dog will pick it up and try to carry it to her. We didn't teach her this, she's just started doing it today. She's quite a small dog though, so if it's upstairs she can't carry it down the stairs - she just stands on the top step and drops it.

Presumably the teeth marks and dog saliva aren't doing much for the screen either?

One of our platys has had a baby, it's super-cute. Presumably she had between 50 and 100 babies but somehow this one survived. Normally they need to be in a separate tank to breed so how this one avoided being eaten for long enough to become big enough to not get eaten I have no idea. I'll try taking a picture but basically it's like this:



only smaller.

Platys! The ones in my dad's tank kept having babies. Over and over again. It got to the point where the aquarium became self-sustaining. My dad would collect the babies, take them to the aquatics shop and swap them for store credit which he'd use to buy fish food and other aquarium stuff.

Yeah, the cuteness and novelty factor is wearing off pretty quick.

My ringtone used to be the theme tune to True Blood. Now, when we watch True Blood, as soon as the credits start my dog sits right up and stares around the room.

I was woken up at 4.30am Thursday morning by noise in the hall. I went out and the cat had a live mouse and was playing with it. We have just had a new boiler fitted and a load of tanks and pipes were remove leaving some holes in the floor boards so I figured she had caught it in the house.

So I let here play with it until she killed it then chucked it outside, thinking it was a good idea to encourage her to catch them in the house.

I sleep downstairs in the week since we had the baby as I need to get sleep etc for work. As my wife is busy with the baby I get away with leaving the bedroom window open and letting her come in and out as well as sleep on the bed, something my wife banned me from doing. I don’t want to lose the bond I have with her and want to keep her happy so that she isn’t an issue with the baby. So far she is fine and really just ignores him.

So last night she came in at 11.45 and instead of jumping on the bed she stayed on the floor and was “talking to me”. I put the light on and she had another mouse! So looks like she is bringing them in from outside. She again played with it, she kept knocking it under the bed and crying until I got it out. Eventually she ate it.

I looked this up on the web and apparently this is common in spayed females, she views me as family and is bring the mice in live to show me how to catch a mouse! Humans play right into the cats hands as they want us to interact with the mouse and our natural reaction when presented with a live one late at night is usually to do just that!

I personally find it really sweet and evidence that we have a really strong bond, she came in 2 hours later than normal so must have made some effort to get me a “training mouse”, my wife however is going nuts! I will sleep with her and the baby for the next few night so there won’t be any opportunity for more training for a while!

Yup, ours used to do it all the damned time. She was really good at bringing them in totally unharmed, so they could run around the bedroom at 4am.

Ours went through a catching live frog stage ( along with loads of mice ), which was pretty icky. We had a creaky old Jack Russell at the time, so they might have been trying to teach her what to do.

And frogs are *really* loud when being tormented by a cat.

When we moved house a couple of years ago we found several dessicated frogs behind furniture that had obviously been brought in and then misplaced by the cat.

I caught and played with frogs all my childhood. Only this year did I learn that could make that noise when threatened.

Around 95% of all frogs my cat plays with get away, they know how to play the long game and stay still. She loses interest if the thing she is chasing stops moving.

So far this week the presents have been moths, she proudly brings them in, plays for 2 minutes then eats them!

Last night we were back to mice, whilst she was playing with this one it bit her. She cried then went back outside leaving me to deal with it.

I let it go as I thought it had made a good job of sticking up for itself!

Don't do that! By letting the strong aggressive mice survive, you're speeding up mouse evolution process locally. In a couple of years you'll be over run by savage, bloodthirsty mice the size of terriers.

Unfortunately one of my son's guinea pig's died this morning.

Yesterday he was fine, this morning he was on his side, occasionaly twitching his legs. We took him to the vet and they did what they could, but he was apparently twitching every other minute or so. So they decided the best thing for him was to put him to sleep.

My son doesn't know yet, as he is at an afterschool function. I have that 'joy' to come when he comes home

Malc

One of my dogs isn't right this morning. She was crying through the night and this morning she didn't get out of bed when I came down the stairs, when I managed to get her to stand up she was shaking and had her tail between her legs. I've called the vet and we're going down at half eleven. I'm all worried about her.

Arra is ok, nothing obviously serious wrong with her. She's got painkillers and she might have early onset arthritis she's only two and a half the wee soul.

At least it's nothing serious, Gilly.

Found out the mystery illness that had inflicted our lab-she'd swallowed an inch square piece of Nyla bone. I know this because I 'found' it a few days later. No wonder she was in pain!

Anyway, here's a wee Merry Christmas from Willow and Arra

After a few weeks the presents got out of hand, I awoke one morning to find the cat in the spare room looking excited so I knew she had something, it turned out to be a baby rat, it was very lively so maybe was a bit sharper than a mouse as it had evaded death for some hours, she had also at one point trapped it in the gap where the door meets the wall and it had crapped on the carpet.

So I killed the rat and refused to let her in for a few nights, she hasn’t bought anything in for ages now.

She has the total run of us now, we haven’t had time to put our foot down since we had the baby. This is what happened last night.

1. Let her in at 12.30am as she was on the roof crying at our bedroom window
2. Fed her
3. 1am she comes to the bedroom door crying and scratching the door
4. Gets more food
5. 2.30am she comes to the bedroom door crying and scratching the door
6. This time she wants attention so I lie on the spare bed under the covers and she sits on top of me for 15 minutes purring her head off. Then she disappears
7. 5.30am she comes to the bedroom door crying and scratching the door
8. This time she wants to go out

Sounds really bad but our 6 month old is up half the night with wind so I don’t really notice, not a good thing to be letting the cat get away with so much though!

My cat is now refusing to eat her cat food, she goes through stages where she just licks off the gravy and leaves the rest, usually after a week she will eat 3 packs in a day then start to eat her food normally.

This latest session of fussy eating has been going on for 3 weeks, it pisses my wife of as I empty her food bowl that's full of licked cat food into the kitchen bit and within 4 hours the bin stinks.

My wife thinks we should just leave the food, but I don't agree, we moved her food into the conservatory from the kitchen as my son is crawling now and kept going straight to her food and trying to eat it!

So she gets flies on the stuff she leaves, my view is that she shouldn't have to eat shitty stale cat food that have had flies on it so I keep giving her fresh food which starts of the stinking bin again and pisses my wife off

I noticed the other night that she will eat roast chicken bits no problem, so now have decided to just buy the cheapest Tesco chicken legs I can find and cook those for her.

Question is will this be ok for her? She has a bowl of biscuits kept full all the time so I assume that the vitamins etc she needs will be in these? Given that most cat food looks and smells like shit I can't see chicken being a real problem? I will also give her other meat and stuff when we have it, which I have always done.

I don't think chicken will do her any harm, my cats have done this sort of thing and I had thought it might have been a bad batch of food. Also try the stuff in jelly, sometimes they just get bored!

Mine go through fussy phases. Just buy a load of different brands of cat food and never put the same one down twice in a row, plus only put small amounts out so it doesn't go off so quickly and wash the bowl frequently.

You're right to chuck the manky cat food away. Unlike dogs, who are better equipped to deal with pretty much whatever shit they eat, cats don't have the same digestive process and dodgy food will give them the shits (or worse). I'm guessing your wife would rather a slightly stinky bin than having to clean up cat crap from everywhere

As long as your cat is getting taurine from another source (i.e. wet or dried 'complete' cat food) it'll be fine to eat the chicken.

One of our cats is historically incredibly fussy and neurotic about food and will happily eat a particular flavour/brand one week then utterly refuse to touch it the next week which has driven us nuts. We switched them over to a particular brand which we get from the vet, Royal Canin Obesity Management, for the sake of the other cat who's too fat, but fussy cat has happily eaten this stuff for months with no problem at all and it's only now I'm reading the posts here that I even remembered we used to have the issue. Fussy cat is still pretty flighty at times so what I do is feed them in separate rooms so fat cat can't push fussy cat out of the way to eat her food as well and that seems to be working well. Um, none of which is probably any good to you is it?

Ours can be a bit hit and miss with most foods but Whiskas Simply they always eat. It has actual recognisable chunks of meat/fish in it. One of them mostly has dry food but you need to be careful with that and read the amounts they should be getting from the box. We get the Iams stuff and it's a surprisingly small amount they should be eating.

Having problems with the dogs. Over the last few weeks, they've started fighting sometimes in the house, or when they get off the lead on a walk. Once they seperate they are fine and even sleep next to each other, or cuddled up together, but after a few instances it was getting really worrying. Tried to be really firm with them and not let them off the lead at the same time but even when one was off, they were coming over to the other to try it. Found out our pet insurance covers animal behaviourist so now we have a dog whisperer coming out to see us. Really hoping we can resolve it, it is possibly down to the fact that the lab is coming into maturity and no longer happy to accept Willow as the dominant one. Dog whisperer is coming a week on Friday so in the meantime, she has told us to keep them seperate anytime we aren't with them and to remove all sources of tension. So now, we have to walk both seperately, they're sleeping in seperate rooms and if one of them looks like starting anything then the leads come out even in the house. It's pretty stressful!

Really worried but hopeful it can be fixed. I would be totally devastated if they had to be seperated permanently. It has also had an unintended consequence...Arra (the lab) is sleeping in the kitchen just now and last night she got into a bag of flour. The kitchen looked like it had been snowing and all day she has been doing big loud farts and pooing what looks like wallpaper paste

Being a dog owner is so not glamorous!

Mine is going through phases of eating, last week she had some grass in her throat and was coughing all the time, I took her to the vets who gave her an anti inflammatory jab (for £30 ) Still ate during this time, but not that much

I changed the cat food from jelly to gravy and she ate 4 packs of it in a day, now she is back to her old tricks of licking the jelly or gravy of the food and leaving most of it. I now have 2-3 types\brands of food and rotate along with bits of chicken and other meat scraps.

I also cook at lot on the barbecue and she has caught on, usually around 10 minutes before the food is done she turns up looking hopeful!

I don't have dogs but (I know, I know... disregard everything say from this point!) I do have family with more than one dog, though. Is it not a matter of asserting the pack order? Like you would do if you had children in a house with dogs. The child has to come higher up the pack than the dog, they don't sort that out by fighting with the child; there are behaviours that are reinforced so the dog learns it comes lower down the chain than the child. Can you reaffirm Willow as higher up the order than Arra? She must be feeling like there's a chance to get higher up than Willow is. With kids you do everything to treat them all equally but with dogs, you have to treat the more dominant dog as that, and favour her more than the submissive one.

I'm not sure how you do that especially, perhaps feed Willow first? Get her in and out of the car or house first when you go for walks? I expect the dog whisperer will help, good luck Gilly, I'm sure they won't need separating once you start enforcing the rules to keep Arra in line!

Thanks flis we are trying to make sure they both know willow is the main one which is hard because we feel mean but it's clearly some sort of power struggle. Fingers crossed the dog whisperer saves the day!

Impressed you can get a dog whisperer on pet insurance. Good luck with it, sure he can sort it out.

My cat appears to have developed some sort of 6th sense as to when I've finished cooking food on the barbecue.

When the weather is nice she will appear looking hopeful 10-15 minutes before the food is ready.

Tonight she was already outside and I was cooking some chicken with the help of a patio umbrella as it was chucking it down.

Just as I finished and plated it up there she was, I hadn't seen her since mid morning

I guess the fact she always gets some food out of me when I'm barbecuing helps!

I'm no animal expert, but I think it's more likely to be a sense of smell than that of telepathy.

Mrs Grim... (snr) is going to be busy for the next few weeks.



Thirteen of the little fuckers!

Aaaaaaaaaaaand I've just realised what I posted

*dies a little inside*

One appears to be trying to get back in.

Aww! What breed are they? So cute!

Stressed out today! Willow was licking her leg yesterday but we couldn't see anything. Then by the time I was coming home from work she was lying in her bed shaking and crying. We had a closer look and found loads of little needle sharp grass seeds imbedded in her armpits of her front legs. They are about an inch long and at least 50% of each one were under the skin. Some of them were totally imbedded. It took an hour to tweeze them all out and she's been left with raw skin that's bleeding and weeping. We gave her a wee painkiller and she stopped shaking and crying once we were finished but I'm still worried we could have missed one. Apparently they just keep working their way under the skin because they're barbed like a fish hook so they can make their way to the organs and cause serious problems. Going to see how she looks tonight but if she's still looking swollen and still out of sorts then I'm going to take tomorrow off and take her to the vet.

I've never heard of that before; that's horrible! I hope she's on the mend now you've sorted it.

Wow I never knew that either poor Willow

That's terrible. My pooch has had seeds over him before but I try and get them off when we get home. It's bloody easy to miss the little blighters though. I never knew they could burrow under the skin - yikes!

I hope he gets better. X

We had no idea either and now we feel terrible that she's in so much pain and discomfort and we didn't do anything sooner. Wee soul. I'd mixed the painkiller in with her dinner but she wouldn't touch it even when I brought it to her so I ended up dripping it on to a rasher and she couldn't resist it no matter how poorly she felt.

A couple of weeks ago a little cat we hadn't seen before turned up in our garden, every day I came home from work he would do the exact same run across the garden so we named him Glitch after the cat in the matrix. After about three days he started to hang around more asking for food, so we fed him and gave him a cardboard box with a cushion in. He took up residence and stayed for a few days but just as we were at the point of taking him into the house, presuming he was lost, he dissapeared. We found out that he had belonged to a neighbour 2 doors down who was affected by flooding and moved house to Dundee. They had abandoned him because they bought a puppy and it didn't get on with the cat. Glitch showed up again at about 9 last night in terrible shape, barely able to move and not eating or drinking even though he was emaciated. He went to the emergency vet and is still on a drip there, not doing well apparently, Mrs. W and I are heartbroken. Hoping he gets better and comes home with us soon.
:(:(

Oh that's so sad

If you need any money towards the vets bill I'd happily chuck a tenner your way.

Hoping he is on the mend very soon.

That's a cool name.

Aw no, that's awful the poor wee soul Let us know how he is.

Aw you guys are lovely thanks, should be ok I'm going to see if the vet will be nice to us because he's a stray.

Can you not report the neighbour for cruelty?