Yay for cats! (and pets in general)

[deilaitha]

I love my cats to death. They are a constant source of entertainment for me. For example, my cat Phoebe loves to lick the faucets in the bathroom after they've been on. She sneaks into the shower after I'm done and drinks water off of the floor. Never mind the perfectly good filtered water in their bowl.

Yesterday, Cecilia (that's the orange kitty in my avatar pic) was running around like she had rockets attached to her butt and she slammed into my leg as I was walking down the hallway. She slept like a log the rest of the afternoon and I was seriously worried she'd concussed herself. But by evening, she was running around maniacally playing with her favorite toy--tail bushed up and back all arched.

What amusing pet stories do you have? Do any characters in your stories have pets?

I have a character who keeps pets...but he is a haruspex and so they don't last long, sadly. (I know, I am twisted. My husband reminds me of this any time I mention said character. By the way, if you don't know what a haruspex is, look it up sometime you are not eating.) Also, do you like it when characters in stories you read have pets?

 

[Reaver]

I love all animals but cats are my favorite. I think it's awesome when people give pets human names. I once had a cat named Mel who'd tell you his name if you'd ask him.

 

[GeekDavid]

Librarian has a black kitty named Shadow inhabiting the Guild Library.

 

[Sparkie]

This seems as good a place as any to post this story.

In my line of work I deal with truck drivers on a continual basis. I've met all kinds; some good, some bad, some nice, some rude, some gregarious, some lonely, ect. Occasionally I'll find a truck driver that likes to write in his/her spare time, and we speak about favorite authors, tropes, and the like.

Truck drivers who drive over the road for many days at a time (OTR drivers) sometimes take pets with them, most often dogs and cats. Pets can be a lifesaver to someone who's on a long, socially isolating trip, and most truck drivers undertake that sort of thing for a living.

With that background in mind, here's the story:

A couple of months ago I was working late one night, which is a regular thing for me in the summer. A truck driver pulled up at our location needing to be loaded with material. She was a nice lady, drove a flatbed trailer. I loaded her up and she began to secure and tarp her load. Once I got her shipping papers ready I headed back out to her truck to hand her the bill of lading. She was still busy with her load, so she said "Could you just put it on the floor of the cab, please?" I nodded and walked to her driver's side door. She waited until then to tell me "If you're afraid of getting bitten you may not want to open that."

Now, I'm curious by nature. Being given a warning only made me want to see what was in the cab even more, so I opened the door. Inside, on the driver's seat, was a smallish creature with a long body and brown-grey fur. I must've been staring for a bit, because all of a sudden the lady was beside me with the biggest grin on her face. "Don't worry about him," she said, "He's okay. It's the others you have to worry about."

She reached up to the seat and pulled the ferret down by the scruff of it's neck. She handed him to me the way someone might hand you a bag of groceries, then made some kind of noise with her lips. Two more ferrets appeared inside the cab, one looking like the one I now held in my arms like a newborn baby, the other as pure white as you can imagine. She grabbed the ordinary looking one and showed him to me. "This is Carl," she said. "He's a rescue. Mean when he wants to be. I named him for my ex-husband."

As if this wasn't strange enough, I heard something in the cab. I looked, and the white ferret had disappeared only to be replaced by two guinea pigs. I was stating to get the picture.

"You have a lot of critters in there," I said, rather stupidly.

She laughed. "There's a few more in there you haven't seen. And I just got a new rat. Can't let him loose in there yet, though." She put Carl back in the cab and took the ferret from my arms. "It takes awhile to develop trust."

"Huh. You take them with you everywhere?"

"Yup. They're my babies. My grandkids love 'em."

She put the first ferret back in the truck, took the papers I had for her and tossed them onto the dash, then closed the door. I smiled and went back to work. Later we chatted a bit and I found out that this same truck driver enjoyed writing fantasy. I told her about this site and she seemed interested in checking it out. Whether on not she ever reads this, I thought it was a story worth telling here. Pets can enrich the lives of pet owners, but also others. I'll never forget that night, all because this lady showed kindness both to the creatures she owned and to me.

 

[Chilari]

I have a cat, or rather my parents do. His name is Chaucer (we don't give our pets names that normal people have, we name them after historical or fictional figures or in the case of my first cat, other animals; the spider in my bathroom, though not actually a pet so much as live-in pest control, is called Augustus.)

Chaucer's a silly old thing. We think he's about 9 or 10 years old, but we got him as a stray a couple of years ago. Basically, he appeared in the neighbourhood, mum and another woman at the other end of the village started feeding him, when the other woman moved away she got him chipped and brought him round to give to my mum, and that was that. Chaucer broke his leg at some point in his pre-adoption days, so now walks awkwardly and sits with that leg poking out, but he can still run and jump if he needs to. He's happy to walk around the garden with mum, and he likes to nap on the picnic bench on the patio when it's sunny out. His favourite toy is a cork on a string, which I dangle in front of him and he plays with, not really trying to catch it, more treating it like that game with the tennis ball on a string attached to a pole where you bat at it and it goes around. That game. The cork on the string is Chaucer's version of that. But he's got lazy. He doesn't chase it any more, he rolls ont his back and bats at it, and if it goes out of reach he just watches it. When he catches it, he licks the string. I don't know why that is. Maybe cleaning his tongue.

Sometimes I don't visit my parents house to see them, I visit to see Chuacer.

 

[Sheilawisz]

I have a Tabby Cat called Jerry, my beloved pet, partner and friend since January 2007.

That day, January 4th of 2007, I was washing the dishes when I could hear my father arriving and opening the door. Then there it was, a precious, little kitty meowing and crying like crazy...

This is my furball with claws:

Jerry was a little sick when this picture was taken back in November of 2012, and he is now happier and more friendly than he was then. My furry beast always scratches my door so I let him come in every morning, and then he jumps on my bed and falls asleep on top of me =)

 

[Ireth]

I miss my kitties. We used to have three, a young brother and sister named William and Buffy, and an old male named Clementine. Buffy died about five years ago of kidney failure, and not long after that William died of a stroke. Finally we had to put Clementine down because he was incredibly old and very incontinent. I think he was 18, maybe even 19 when he died. Sadly, I don't have pictures of any of them on my laptop.

 

[Butterfly]

I have Snowy... here is is on my bed, with a cheeky smile on his face.

He's a Jack Russell and is nearly 10. He's very intelligent... I house trained him in 8 days from 8 weeks old. He will sit, and twirl, play dead, lay down, catch, tell you when you've missed the phone ringing, and when someone is at the front door. He will even respond to, 'What do you want?'... 'Hammmm.'

But it has taken 9 years for him to decide to obey the command to 'come back,' and just as long to not wander so far when off the lead.

When he was a pup... he would play when any other dog, roll on his back, wag his tale. Now... when he sees another dog the first thing he does is growl... he's gone rather grumpy in his elder years.

The thing he loves the most is comfort. A duvet on a chair that he will sleep all day in, because even though he is meant to be a hunter, he's a lazy thing. If he's not there, he's in front of the fire, so cols that he's risking a nasty burn to his nose, otherwise he's stretched out on someone's bed (and it's surprising how much of the bed a small dog can take). he's there especially because he gets too scared to brave the kitchen when I am cooking... he thinks the toaster will set off the smoke alarm for some reason... I can't possibly think why.

He likes to watch cakes cooking in the oven, and the fish swimming in the pond. He has ended up in the pond on occasion... and he digs up my strawberry patch to bury treats, but he won't even sniff the strawberries... after they made him sick one summer when he ate the lot of them.

 

[Addison]

I only had a pet cat once in my life, and I loved it, even if he was a pain in the butt. My baby sister named him Toto, and Toto was more of an outside cat by my father's choice. What he would do to say "Let me inside" was jump onto the window screen and just stick there meowing until he was let in. If he caught a mouse he'd play with it. One time he threw it into my lap. That was special.

But the most amusing pet stories I have would be about my dogs.

First amusing story would be when my dog Buddy was a puppy. He and his brother, Tank, would sleep into a fence off part of the kitchen (the kennel door was part of the fence) But Buddy wanted to sleep on the carpet or in my bed. So he would climb up the kennel door, jump into the hall and scamper into my room.

Second would be when we moved into our new house. The house was on five acres and had a pond which the dogs loved, until my baby brother accidentally steered a remote control boat up Tank's back. The poor dog went running out of the pond with Buddy running after trying to bit the boat of his yowling brother's back.

No matter where we went through there were two ways to get a laugh from the dogs. One was to run the sprinkler to watch Buddy try to bite the water. Second was to get a laser pointer or flash light and run it over the walls and ceiling to watch the dogs go nuts.

But most hilarious has been recently at our new house. Here at small town USA we have snow. And with Jazzy the puppy Labrador, snow equals fun. She loves the snow. It will get so deep off the deck that she'll take a flying leap and disappear. All we'd see for twenty heart-stopping seconds is snow. Then the top of her head when she looks back with a "Don't bother me!" look. And she doesn't run through snow, she deer hops. Rex, on the other hand, hates the snow. He'll get used to it if we go for a long walk. But most of the time he won't go off the deck.

For a while we had a little Shitzu puppy, which was interesting as the dog required a haircut once a month so we could tell his head from his butt. But being the smallest dog and thinking he was so big he'd drive the bigger dogs nuts. Especially Jazzy. He'd run around and goad her until she chased him, and the little mop-dog would dive under the sofa and bark at her, cute Jazzy who could only get her paws underneath. Sparky would proceed to snap forward and swipe or bite at her paws and nose. Jazzy would pad around the sofa and try to get him.

Also about Sparky, being the smaller one, is when he would try to play with the big dogs. He couldn't get his mouth on the large balls. But tug-of-war was hilarious. You had two good sized dogs pulling eachother around the room and Sparky would either bite them in the butt and/or jump up and grab the rope with his back paws dangling over the floor. So the came turned into Tug-of-rope-and-Sparky-in-the-middle.

Most hilairous though is another Sparky story. True Jazzy did pull my brother through the snow on a trash can lid, and my sister over the leafy ground chasing a squirrel. But this is hands-down the funniest. Last Christmas I was home with the dogs and kids while my folks were at a party. They came back and Sparky went nuts. He was running at my step-dad barking and growling, trying to bite his feet. Apparently he didn't recognize him all dressed up. My step-dad took a step forward to pet Sparky but that sent him running through the living room in a circle, dive under the sofa where he kept barking and growling. All we could see were his two angry eyes. Of course my step-dad kept goading him. Sparky didn't come out until my step-dad came back in sweat pants.

Those are my pet stories. And I wouldn't give up my pets for anything.

 

[Rinzei]

I'm actually looking at puppies this weekend, to pick up at the end of November. We weren't allowed pets at our old place, but now that we've moved into our own house, PUPPY AHOY! The ones we're viewing are Welsh Pembroke Corgis, 3 weeks old. So cute! But I'll try to stay practical about it and now die of adorable.

 

[Addison]

I just looked them up. So CUTE!!

 

[Addison]

My dream pet would be a dragon. In this world, reality , I'd say it's a tie between an orange tabby, chesapeake lab, or a spider monkey. If I had a huge aquarium then I'd choose an otter.