Pets in the Playground

[plazeebo]

... yaay 10th post. Can't even quote someone with a link. Grr..

[plazeebo]

nonono, the current FOOF thread is over here.

Chemistry jokes are BEST jokes.

I prefer the non-splodey kind.

More Foof you say?

I can help you with that

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FOOF & micro-foof!

[Jerry]

Aww I love seeing pictures of everybody's pets! I love all animals, but personally have a two year old corgi named Beyoncé who I usually just call Bae.

[Peelee]

... yaay 10th post. Can't even quote someone with a link. Grr..

Was the inability to link also affecting the ability to imbed images?

[plazeebo]

Yes I couldn't do either but it's all better now.

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[Peelee]

yes i couldn't do either but it's all better now.

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ohmygoditsakitty!

[goto124]

Not my pets, not sure if strays or someone else's pets...

Once, I met a group of 4 kittens - black with white spots, all mewing rather cutely. I didn't see their mom, but they'd made their home in the waiting area of a car wash. As I sat on a chair waiting for the car to get clean, one of the adorable tiny kittens walked up to my feet and started clawing at my shoes! After a while, it even jumped and clung onto my trousers! Good thing I was wearing long trousers that day, otherwise I would've been scratched.

I slowly lowered my leg to let the kitty down, then continued playing with them for a bit longer. I thought they would be afraid since they're so young, but I was wrong

[Fri]

On that, I once went to a random fastfood restaurant, and there's a family of cats making their home in the bushes nearby. A cat and three kittens. They all looks quite well fed and healthy, to be honest. What amused me was that the cat spends its time sitting silently and politely on the other side of the restaurant's glass door, watching the customers inside, presumably waiting for one of the customers to take pity on it and give them their scraps. It doesn't even beg or meow, just sit and stare silently. Judging from their condition, I assume it was working.

[Winter_Wolf]

Now that's a crafty kitty. Meowers are just annoying. Oh, maybe it's a phrenic kitty using mind control to get people to give up the grub. That's what the quiet cat stare is about; it's succeeded where other felines have only dreamed.

Strange I'd praise a cat since I'm not much of a cat person.

[goto124]

Strange I'd praise a cat since I'm not much of a cat person.

This is the mark of a great cat, capturing the hearts of even those who aren't really cat lovers.

[Remmirath]

It's cool hearing about all the different pets people have here! I've always liked snakes and lizards, but keeping them wouldn't work out too well for us (err, partly because I'm the only one in the family who likes them, and I don't much like taking care of animals all on my own). They're neat, though.

We have three cats, all of whom were taken in as kittens from being strays in our backyard (the area we live in has something of a stray cat problem, but hey, at least we got three great cats out of it). As such, we're really not sure what sort of cat they are, although we strongly suspect that they've got a large portion of some forest cat variety -- my guess is towards Siberian -- but we could be wrong about that. Before we took them in they were great tree climbers, and still climb around various things indoors, and they love water (Shale especially). They make a wide variety of interesting vocalisations, mostly trills and chirps. Plus, they're big; they'll be a year old next month, all being from the same litter, and the smallest of them is currently the average size for an adult cat. The biggest one comes up about halfway on me when he stands, and even though I'm kind of short, that's still pretty big for a cat not even a year old. They're also clearly still growing, seeming to be going through a bit of a growth spurt now, so they might end up rather large indeed. Luckily, we have a fairly big house, so three big cats won't be a problem.

They're all very sweet tempered and affectionate cats, although they're kind of scared of other people (they knew us since they were very small, but other people are apparently scary).

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The grey one on the left is Ash, who is the first one we took in by a couple of months; he'd been bitten by a large dog, and it was touch and go rather he'd make it for a while, but he's doing quite well now. He's not as strong in the hind legs or tail as the others, and he's not as good of a jumper, but he's pretty spry. He's extremely playful and kind of needy, not liking being left alone for very long. He can often be found sitting next to or on people while they play computer games, or settling down to watch a hockey game in the living room. He's quite affectionate with all of us, but he has the strongest bond with my mom, who's the one who (aside from the vet, of course) primarily nursed him back to health. He has a somewhat annoying happen of nocking small items down from the gaming table to get our attention and carrying them away in his mouth, but it could certainly be worse. All in all, they're all quite well-behaved, particularly for having been essentially wild before we took them in.

The white and grey one on the right is Shale. He's the biggest one (weighed in at close to ten pounds when we first took him to the vet when he was eight or so months old), and he's also the most sweet and gentle of the three. He's sensitive and gets overwhelmed easily, so he likes to spend time by himself up where nobody can get to him, but when he's not doing that he tries to spend a lot of time with everybody. He likes to flop down in the middle of the living room while we're watching TV, and he's the one most likely to curl up on somebody's bed. He doesn't really play favourites with us. He also, as mentioned above, really likes water, and can often be found cavorting around in the bathtub if it's still wet after someone's had a shower, or turning on one of the faucets so he can drink from it. Luckily, he turns them back off again, too, or that would be pretty annoying. He's also not very brave; he always used to hide in the highest branches of the tree outside when anything like another cat or animal came into the yard, and he still gets frightened easily now that he's indoors. He's also got a tendency to leap up onto the gaming table and walk up to everyone to rub noses with them, which is endearing but also kind of annoying when he knocks things over with his tail. It's a minor price to pay for a great cat, though.


This one is Shadow. She's the bravest of the lot, and was the one who ran other neighborhood strays off when they were outdoors, and we were concerned that she might not make a very good pet initially (she hadn't really warmed up to us as much when we took her in), but she's actually a very sweet cat as well. She's more my brother's cat than anything else, since she seems to love him especially, but she can also often be found chilling somewhere in my room while I draw. Okay, actually, all of them seem to like my room -- probably because it's the darkest and warmest one. That's where all of these pictures are taken. Shadow and Ash also both really love wrestling with each other, which can get a little annoying in the dead of the night, but I've learned to ignore it. She's very insistent about grooming other cats and people, and will often follow us around and chirp at us until we let her do that.

They all tend to line up to greet us when we come home or wake up in the morning, and jump up to stare out the window whenever one of our cars pulls up in the driveway (clearly they've realised the difference between our cars pulling up and other cars going by, because they only do that for our cars). We hadn't been intending to get cats, especially since we thought my brother was allergic -- which he could still be, since there's a decent chance that they're largely a hypoallergenic type of cat -- but I'm glad we ended up with these three.

Those aren't the best pictures of them. My brother has ones that are much better (no surprise since he's a photographer), but that's what I've got on my computer.

And, for more cat viewing pleasure -- although these aren't strictly our cats -- the cats that we know to be their parents.

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This is their mother, who we've named Ophelia. She showed up in our yard a few years ago, probably still as a kitten herself -- she's grown a lot since then -- and we spent several years trying to entice her to get near enough to us that we could take her into the vet and try to make her into a pet. We're pretty sure she was dumped by students who moved out, as she had trimmed claws when we first saw her, and she often acts like a pet (worming around furniture, coming up to the door and begging, worming around our legs when she thinks we can't see her), but we're also pretty sure she was abused by some other people since then. She's terrified of people in general, and has this weird sort of thing going on where she clearly wants to come up to us, but won't. She also had a lot of fur missing around her neck when we first saw her, and has a very hoarse voice. She did bring us her kittens, though, and we finally managed to catch her and get her fixed and taken to the vet -- so that's progress. She's still skittish, though. She appears to have been largely raised by squirrels (we found her raiding the bird feeders the first time), and spends most of her time in the tree. She's not much bigger than Shadow, but there's no way of knowing how much of that is due to her period of near-starvation living off bird food and biscuits before we started feeding her and how much of that is just how she always would've been.


This is almost certainly their father, since we saw him around a lot around the time the kittens appeared. We also saw him playing with them, teaching them hunting games, and curling up with them in the grass, so I think it's safe to say that he's at least the father of one of them (Shale looks a fair bit like him but with lighter fur in the pattern). He's quite wild, though; he keeps his distance. We haven't seen him around much lately, so he may not even have been from our area. He's also big, though there's no reference in that picture. I'd put him in the same size category as a medium sized dog, which is what I was concerned he was when I first saw him in the yard from a distance. Definitely in the upper range of domestic cat size. Someone's outdoor pet Maine C keeps wandering into our yard lately (kind of annoying, but I don't know whose it is -- it's got a collar and bell and all though, so definitely a pet) and I'd say this guy is about the same size.

[Fri]

big fluffy cats!

[Fri]

There aren't any update in the thread for a while, so let me post some more cat pics!

Here's room kitten when it was still very small and sad.

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Here it is now, perching like it owns the place.

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[Grim Portent]

Was out in the with the cat recently.

Whenever there's someone in the garden with her and she's on one of the paths she starts rolling from side to side and waggling her feet in the air. I think it's her way of begging for attention, but for some reason she never does it on the lawns or in the flowerbeds.

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[Fri]

You should've written "Warning: cats doing silly things."

[Grim Portent]

Not actually my pet, but I felt like people may like this anyway.

I was out in the garden today doing some bits and pieces of work, mostly chopping away overgrown plants we wanted rid of, and when I went inside this little sweetie was sitting on the kitchen windowsill. She must have come in through the backdoor while no one was looking.

She bolted outside when she noticed me, but when I went out she wandered up to me for a stroke and a cuddle.

If she's the cat I think she is then we see her around every now and again and think she belongs to the neighbors across the street. She's always been extremely friendly, running up to us when we're in the street, out in the garden or unloading shopping from the car and nuzzling our legs until we stop what we're doing and pet her. She once jumped up into the boot of my mum's car and started walking back and forth on the edge meowing for claps.

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