Post your pet!

[Nesrie]

This is my mall rescue kitty, my only pet at the moment from a not too long ago game night. I had the plastic wrap off this box and the lid on the couch for less than a minute when he decided it would make a nice bed for the night. That cat wand on the carpet, he drags it around with him whenever I have guests for more than ten minutes in the hopes he can con someone into playing with him.j

He only comes out during game night if I have maybe 2-3 people. Anymore than that and he will hide. And those 2-3 people need to be my more frequent visitors, people he thinks he knows.

He sometimes sits kind of weird and watches me. I’ve never seen another cat sit like this before.

[MrTibbs]

He’s so handsome!

[Chronic]

Bella, I knew she would mess with it somehow so I was stacking the lid so she couldn’t get into the good stuff too much. She didn’t care.

[JonRowe]

[Navaronegun]

That dawg just got long.

[RichVR]

L O N G B O I

[JonRowe]

Having never raised a puppy or dog before, holy hell is it a lot of work.

She is being good about the cats now, and they are reaching some sort of detente at the baby gate we have set up. Still not contact/sniffing but, slowly inching closer, and she is being very calm (no barking, a bit of whining) but she doesn’t fixate, you can easily pull her attention away.

I just worry because she is going to be a big girl 80 lbs +, and I don’t want her to manhandle the cats. It is a slow process, but I think it is going well.

We are crate training her, and it is the saddest thing ever, because she whines and howls like mad for 10 minutes, and you just have to ignore her.

How can you ignore that?

She sleeps in the crate at night OK. She is nearly 4 months old, so we get up at 3am for a potty break. She has been going outside with minor accidents. She is starting to understand the crate = us leaving. Which is bad, gonna have to break that over the weekend with short cratings and treats.

But you gotta be strong, and we can’t let her roam the house until she stops teething (she loves to chew) and can be trusted with the kitties.

I think housebreaking is going ok, she is peeing in her crate a bit, even though she is never in there for more than 4 hours at a time.

She is so calm though, it is crazy. When dogs bark or squirrels run, she just stands silently watching. (probably why they didn’t want her as a guard dog)

We got puppy classes coming up next month, so that will be good.

Any advice on crating? We want her to have her safe space, and learn some independence (she is constantly underfoot) but it is a struggle to get her in the crate now. I think we are going to upgrade treats for the crate, and feed her all her meals in there now.

It is worth it for the insane butt wagging and tail wagging when you get home though.

Such a sweet girl!

[JonRowe]

Also, they said she is a Pyrenees/Antatolian Shepherd cross.

I don’t see a lick of Pyrenees in her looks at all. She definitely has the Shepherd eyes, and she is lanky AF. But I feel like she looks more of a boxer/Anatolian cross. I guess she has that pyrenees personality, as she is very calm and collected.

But she has really short fur, shorter than a Pyrenees by a mile, and definitely shorter than the double coat/shaggy Anatolians.

[Dr_Killinger]

My wife and I have two dogs that are crate trained. Treats, feeding them their regular meals inside the crate, and praising them profusely when the go in on their own are how we managed it. We also picked a key word or phrase that we use religiously every time they have to go inside the crate. Our key phrase is “go to your room”

Edited to include obligatory dog pictures. Here’s our 5 year old terrier mix Edmund:

And here’s the 1 year old black lab mix named Bella. She was dreadfully under weight when we got her from the shelter. Here she is bringing me her food bowl:

[ineffablebob]

Washington, D.C., Is Counting All Its Cats. It Will Take 3 Years And $1.5...

Not my pets, but this seemed like an appropriate thread. 3 years to count cats! How many kittens will be born in that time to throw off the count?

[Timex]

I’d be interested in seeing some real data on how cats are posing a threat to endangered species, because I suspect that’s kind of bullshit.

[CLWheeljack]

It’s fairly well documented, especially on islands. I have no idea how it applies to DC though.

Cat predation on wildlife

The “best” one or those stories is Lyalls Wren, apocryphally the only known species driven extinct by a single individual, a cat named “Tibbles” (although that’s unlikely to actually be true).

Lyall's wren

[Timex]

@krayzkrok

In Australia the estimate for native animal mortality is around 10 million per day.

That number sounds big, but i have no idea what it actually means as far as impact. I mean, having cats kill 10 million animals a day across the entire continent might not really mean anything at all. Rather than just raw estimates of how many things are killed, what would matter would be the trends in the population of those animals.

Certainly on an isolated island, introduced as a predator that nothing else evolved to deal with, i could see a major impact. And Australia had a history of imported species fucking things up, like rabbits.

But in the US? I am skeptical that housecats are having some kind of devastating ecological impact.

[Timex]

I’m not questioning that cats kill tons of animals, but that alone doesn’t result in extinction. These studies are making broad estimates of mortality, but even in the high end, simply killing animals does not necessarily harm their overall population.

In the case of that and based wren on the island, that’s a pretty straightforward case. But when the cats in my neighborhood kill a bird like a Robin… It doesn’t really matter. On some level, killing some animals just makes it easier for the ones who are left to reproduce.

Regardless, the information is interesting, and I’ll be interested to read that nature article in it’s entirety. I must admit that the magnitude of murder committed by cats is larger than i expected. I’m still skeptical that cats in DC are forcing species into Extinction though.

[CLWheeljack]

While I’ll defer to krok’s expertise here, the wiki page I linked notes that there was a UK study that suggests that cat populations don’t appear to have a significant impact on populations in the UK. Which may be true, the impact is going to be variable based on the adaptations of the local wildlife and their familiarity with cat predation. There’s no question that they’re devastating to endemic island populations though.

Again, how it applies to DC? I have no idea. Id imagine many species in the continental US are well adapted for many kinds of predation, from bobcats, snakes, foxes, etc. I don’t even know what species endemic to the DC area are endangered.

[Navaronegun]

Hey guys, could the discussion of feral cat ecological concerns be lifted to a different thread? This is for cute cuddly cat pics, or Lab pups bringing you their food bowls. Gorgeous, btw, @Dr_Killinger

[Timex]

There you go.

[Navaronegun]

Good…restablishing my zen balance again…excellent…

Here are a Bijou and a Copper Puppy and Kitten Pic, respectively…

[tylertoo]

An older photo, before the labradoodle trusted his new bed.

[nKoan]

Got to hang out with my sister’s Anatolian pups. 6 weeks old now and super fluffy.