Pets

Inspired by the cute animals thread.

Do you have any pets? Have you ever had some? Share your adorable (or not so adorable) stories here.

This is Tommy...



I've met a good number of cats but never one quite like Tommy - from the first moment you met him you realized he wasn't like other cats.

Tommy didn't have good experiences with people in the early years of his life. He was rescued as an adult by the SPCA, and our family adopted him after we saw him get incredibly close to picking the lock on his cage. At first he could be a bit aggressive, but that cooled off, and he became exceptionally crafty. Soon he was breaking into the neighbors' for extra meals, designing simple traps and deliberately staging catfights near them, and could even understand that in soccer sometimes not charging at the ball is a good strategy (we had to use a smaller ball for him though he was a good opponent, didn't even mind if we played hard because he made up for it with his cat-like agility and speed - in fact he would taunt us to slide-tackle him sometimes). As he grew older, Tommy really warmed up to people and would obey commands as well or better than any dog. He had a habit of leading any cars that came in down the driveway, enforcing a strict 5kmph speed limit at all times. He was by far the most intelligent cat I'd ever met.

I thought he was super cute anyway. Mind you I was a lot cuter at the time myself, being only like 13. Typically Tommy looked away when you tried to take a picture, unless he was surprised. So that's him gasping right there.

Tommy survived cancer three times, but unfortunately his early experiences left him with a cranial deformation that grew larger with age. He died in 2009, the x-ray of his head completely unrecognisable. The photo up there comes from 2005. All of us still miss him dearly. Definitely cried a lot when I said goodbye.

admin: I hate cats.

Pinkie: But, he seems like he was a great friend.

Pinkie: How come? I hate dogs personally, but I feel justified knowing the total number of people killed by dogs each year is much, much greater than the number killed by cats.

admin: Go to sleep.

Because they scare me.

Pinkie: But they're small and soft and furry and make adorable meow sounds! Not like big nasty dogs that make scary woof sounds.

Also - if you want to post when I'm asleep, wait until about 5AM NZT. 8PM doesn't cut it sorry.

admin: They are both scary.

Oh. Rats. It's 11;30 here.

Pinkie: What DO you like?

admin: Birds. And hamsters.

I like Cats. We have three of them. (a Husband's insurance policy that backfired)
I like most animals but I think I dig Cats' personalities the most. It lets you make vids like this one...

Pinkie: Both are cool but messy animals. My auntie has a huge aviary and spends most of her free time cleaning it. Kind of hard to train those guys.

admin: All pets are messy.

Pinkie: True but some are better at hiding it than others.

admin: I'm not really a pet person. They have no use. (No offense) Did you notice if you say no offense you don't get hate mail?

I have nothing against cats... its just that all the ones I've met seem like they really don't have much interest in you socially. You're just a caressing food dispensing machine.

Dogs may kill more people, but if you counted non-fatal bites vs non-fatal scratching, cats would win by a long shot.

ADreamOfLiberty: Maybe. I think it depends on the cat and the people the cat lives with. Tommy didn't like people at first because people hadn't been very nice to him, but once he saw that we were alright he actually started to hang out with us, and trying out some of the things we did - like coming up with original cat soccer strategies. He just liked people to cheer for him and to cuddle afterwards. He did jump on me once but he never, ever scratched anybody who wasn't another cat. Oh, and another kinda unusual thing for a cat (or a dog for that matter), but Tommy could ration food. If we had to go away from home for a while we could literally just leave him there with the cat food open, and he was a lot less lonely at home than he was at the cattery.

But he's the most extreme example of a social cat I've ever met. Sure, being a cat genius probably helped a lot. And I'll grant that it wasn't human-level socializing. In terms of playing with people, dog-like friendliness etc, Tommy was perfect (vets were always amazed at how we could just command him). Other cats I know could hardly be described in such terms.

My fear of dogs probably comes from being attacked by them as a kid. People used to attack me when I was younger and I guess dogs just wanted in on the action. But whenever I see a dog running down the beach or something I always freak out and think they're coming to get me.

admin: He must have been pretty clever, I've never seen anyone give a cat a command they cared about except "come eat."

I guess we've both been influenced by the animals we've met.

I promise you there are dog equivalents of Tommy, very friendly, very intelligent.

The cats I've met have had nice humans around them their whole life and still turned out 'aloof' and [some] quick to scratch.

I want to ask you, do you think that perhaps a lot more animals have the potential to show the kind of intelligence Tommy did, but it requires some kind of education or developmental program to unlock?

ADreamOfLiberty: I'm sure there are smart & friendly dogs, I just have an automatic assumption that the dog wants to attack me. The more the dog yaps, runs, barks or jumps, the stronger that assumption. But if the dog is more calm and gentle I'll stop running away from it. If I ever own a dog, I would be constantly fearful of finding myself attacking it in self-defense.

I'm not sure about the intelligence thing. We did adopt Tommy because he seemed different from the other cats already - all the other cats kind of looked at us with pleading eyes, and Tommy stood out because he didn't seem to care that we were there and was more interested in figuring out the lock. We did train him a tiny bit with the commands, but Tommy caught on really quickly. For example, when we wanted him to "come here" we would train him by calling out that we were closing the door for the evening in exactly the same way before we had a catdoor installed (using the German expression for "the door is closing"). He was smart (and, by that point, social) enough to generalize that almost immediately, so whenever we told him "the door is closing" in German, he would always stop whatever he was doing and come to us. In a similar way we could make him sit, fetch etc. Soccer was harder. While Tommy could do ball tricks easily enough, the idea that he actually had to take the ball to a goal and stop us taking the ball to his goal took more practice. He also eventually learned to co-operate with a teammate.

I think most cats can recognize at least their name. You can see them perk their ears up when you mention it. And of course they recognize the rattle of cat biscuits. I've heard from other people that cats can be trained similar to how Tommy was using lots of patience and yummy treats as rewards - we never had to use either. And I've certainly rarely seen a cat actively try to play the same games humans play. Another part of my family owns a cat that tries to imitate talking. For example, he saw the kids shout "mommy" whenever they wanted attention, and thus startles people with a surprisingly "mommy" - like meow when he wants something. While not at the range of neat things Tommy would do, he was never trained either, he just picked that up. But my grandparents have cats that are exactly as you describe - all about food and clawing at their owners while getting stroked. So while I'd say most cats have a lot more potential for intelligence than most currently have, I also think that for some cats it's way easier to unlock than others. I'd imagine things would be similar for other animals too.

The big difference between dogs and cats, by the way, is that dogs don't need to be trained to be social. We had to train Tommy to get along with us first, which was especially hard because we had to all go off during the day, and because Tommy had a troubled past. So we actually did have to take an interest in the mice he caught and make sure Tommy was always welcome to be included in the social stuff we did. For example, when having a bonfire, we always made sure to cook up something for Tommy. Basically to teach him that he was part of the family, we weren't going to hurt him, and in fact we liked him. Somehow through all that he realized we weren't just food-dispensing robots. I think a lot of families don't do this kind of thing. Cats apparently need about as many opportunities for learning and play as a human baby. I think it would be fair to say we gave that to Tommy, and combined with his natural intellect it made him a bit of a super cat.

The unfortunate flipside to this is that Tommy didn't get along well with other cats until later in his life. He had been rescued from a cat-fighting ring, and could get very competitive. If there's any relationship between that and his close relationship with people would be interesting.

admin: "If I ever own a dog, I would be constantly fearful of finding myself attacking it in self-defense."

Wow, that's a pretty bad. It's the deep trust that I think a dog can deserve that makes them so special IMO.

"He had been rescued from a cat-fighting ring, and could get very competitive. If there's any relationship between that and his close relationship with people would be interesting."

Ever read "white fang" ?

It's fictional... and about a canine, but the main character never got along with is own species and focused on humans. The author seemed to postulate that when a social animal can't get what it needs to be happy from its own kind, and turns to humans; this manifests as a special cleverness because human intelligence is always challenging them to think more abstractly and 'out of the box' ways in order to understand us.