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There Bias Two posted:Any idea why it is so small? I wish they had a model with an auto-dispensing tower attached. SurePet looks like you need to constantly refill it. It works great for us, but I just give them their food portions once per day at night No idea if I shouldn't be doing that or something though 
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Apr 10, 2022 12:35
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I bought a Surepet for my anxious cat to feed her dry food that my other guy can't eat and have not been able to train her to use it and it's been a bit of a waste of money. It seems like it doesn't open unless she goes further into it than she should have to so she really hasn't learned how to open it on her own. I've done the training recommendations and I can get her to eat out of it sometimes if I open the door for her but I almost think the placement of her chip or something is making it harder to use than it has to be. They include a chip to hang on a collar which might work better in that regard but she doesn't wear a collar anymore and I don't think we can go back. It doesn't seem like this is the normal experience based on the glowing reviews I've read so this might just be an issue for me and my cat who is extremely suspicious about basically everything.
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Apr 10, 2022 13:04
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kaworu posted:Thanks for the replies, guys! Yeah we definitely live in a fairly rural area - up in the mountains, and we’re also the only house on about an acre and a half of land, so I’d honestly be kinda shocked if we didn’t have at least a dozen or so mouse squatting every winter. I can actually hear them skittering around behind the ceiling in a certain area of the basement, which just happened to be right below the sink where Mini-Scratcher has been making all of his kills.
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Apr 10, 2022 15:47
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explosivo posted:I bought a Surepet for my anxious cat to feed her dry food that my other guy can't eat and have not been able to train her to use it and it's been a bit of a waste of money. It seems like it doesn't open unless she goes further into it than she should have to so she really hasn't learned how to open it on her own. I've done the training recommendations and I can get her to eat out of it sometimes if I open the door for her but I almost think the placement of her chip or something is making it harder to use than it has to be. They include a chip to hang on a collar which might work better in that regard but she doesn't wear a collar anymore and I don't think we can go back. That's really weird - some of our cats have chips that migrated to their lower ribs and the SureFeed still works great for them.
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Apr 10, 2022 16:54
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Good morning, I can finally afford to take proper care of these brats and I want to know if I should suck it up and buy the flea and tick preventative from my vet or pet smart that’s like 3 doses for $50+ or is there an effective solution I can buy online for cheap somewhere? I don’t wanna just look up whatever the first thing Amazon says is preferred, I know goons would have a lead on the good stuff for the best deal.
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Apr 13, 2022 15:51
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Bust Rodd posted:Good morning, I can finally afford to take proper care of these brats and I want to know if I should suck it up and buy the flea and tick preventative from my vet or pet smart that’s like 3 doses for $50+ or is there an effective solution I can buy online for cheap somewhere? I don’t wanna just look up whatever the first thing Amazon says is preferred, I know goons would have a lead on the good stuff for the best deal. When I had to get flea medication for my cat (Bravecto) from the vet, but had to buy over the counter meds for my roommate's cats (Frontline) who didn't go to that vet, she said that you have to buy it from a reputable seller (Petsmart). Basically don't buy anything important from Amazon if you don't have to, they have major counterfeit issues
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Apr 13, 2022 15:59
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Bust Rodd posted:Good morning, I can finally afford to take proper care of these brats and I want to know if I should suck it up and buy the flea and tick preventative from my vet or pet smart that’s like 3 doses for $50+ or is there an effective solution I can buy online for cheap somewhere? I don’t wanna just look up whatever the first thing Amazon says is preferred, I know goons would have a lead on the good stuff for the best deal. Do you let your cats outside (indoor/outdoor or on a leash)? If your cats are indoor only you shouldn’t need to give them flea medication. At least that’s what my vet told me 👀
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Apr 13, 2022 17:59
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Crocobile posted:Do you let your cats outside (indoor/outdoor or on a leash)? If your cats are indoor only you shouldn’t need to give them flea medication. At least that’s what my vet told me 👀 Even indoor cats can get fleas sometimes. They do exist outside in the wild and can hitch a ride on you. In one case, I'm 99% sure that I gave my cat fleas because I went over to someone's house, and they were likely infested with fleas (a few days later I noticed I had a ton of little bites around my ankles). EDIT: My 16 year old cat has had fleas 2 times confirmed, and one suspected (but no fleas found) EDIT 2: The two confirmed times were in the same rolling year, so it's possible that I just failed at eradicating them the first time. Iron Crowned fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Apr 13, 2022 |
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Apr 13, 2022 18:11
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I've lived with indoor cats for 30 years now, none of them have gotten fleas except when we took a stray in and she showed up with them. It might be a regional risk, I don't l know much about the habitat of fleas. But unless the vet insists on taking preventative medication, I wouldn't bother until it becomes a problem.
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Apr 13, 2022 20:43
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It's possible to get fleas as an indoor cat, mostly since they can come in with people, but I'm sure there's some unlikely transmission vectors I'm not thinking of as well. But putting them on preventative treatment for that reason seems a bit overkill. I do give my indoor cat dewormer every couple of months, because you can't tell if she has worms and she could get them from licking my shoes or finding things like feathers and bird poops on the balcony.
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Apr 13, 2022 21:17
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We had to say goodbye to a living sunbeam on Sunday night. In his memory, can I get pictures of cats enjoying the sun?
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Apr 14, 2022 22:30
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Rexie's sorry for your loss, and also very enthusiastic about sun (despite her sunburn risk).
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Apr 14, 2022 22:49
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  I met this super friendly stray cat while sneaking a toke behind work one day back at the beginning of the pandemic. She just kept making herself more and more familiar. Now she just lives in our warehouse more or less full time. She likes sunbeams, tummy rubs and giant bowls of food. We think she is a city released bird control cat because of the tipped ear, but whatever. Best coworker imo. Condolences on the loss.
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Apr 14, 2022 23:27
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If you live in an apartment or condo with a shared hallway fleas can get in that way. People walk their dogs through the hall, fleas/eggs fall off the dogs then zip into nearby units. My 4th floor indoor cat got fleas this way once. Houses aren't bullet proof either. If you have a house and have mice, rats, squirrels, birds, etc. using any part of your house for shelter they can bring in fleas. Fleas have no problem moving from the attic to the livingroom. Don't worry about lice though, lice are mostly species specific so they won't move from birds or mice to cats. My indoor pet rat once got lice from mice in our dodgy rental, the cat was fine though. If your cat will tolerate it a cheap flea comb can be good for monitoring. Way cheaper than the medicines, non-toxic, and takes like 20 minutes of cat time every few weeks. If the comb catches a flea you've got fleas. If you don't see any fleas but the comb pulls out black grit that has no reasonable explanation in your clean house, that's probably flea poop and you've got fleas. If you're giving your cat a bath for some reason (why?) and they have fleas you'll probably notice the fleas scrambling to get to the head or floating in the water. This isn't great for monitoring though because obviously you're not going to be giving your bath every month just to check for fleas. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
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Apr 14, 2022 23:52
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Had a massive flea outbreak one time with 3 cats when I was a kid. I remember tucking my pants into my socks because otherwise they would bite the hell out of my ankles. We had to gas the whole house. Bad experience would not recommend.
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Apr 14, 2022 23:57
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I adopted my cat from the city's animal control shelter and they gave her to me with fleas. I'm still annoyed that the employee who went through all the paperwork with me even said "we've noticed that she scratches her ears a lot, but we checked and she doesn't have any parasites, ear infections, etc and we gave her all the usual treatments". The fleas were ... not subtle after a few days and not fun to deal with as a first-time cat owner.
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Apr 15, 2022 00:32
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Lord Zedd-Repulsa posted:We had to say goodbye to a living sunbeam on Sunday night. In his memory, can I get pictures of cats enjoying the sun?  
gloom fucked around with this message at 09:45 on Apr 15, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 09:04
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Here is my foster/trending toward foster fail Iji enjoying the sun today. He was outside last week so he's enjoying being able to chilax inside with a full belly. 
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Apr 15, 2022 16:27
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A little over a week ago a neighbor's dog got out, jumped on our porch, and started barking and generally being an rear end in a top hat while our two indoor cats watched. Well, one cat watched, the other cat went up to 11 on the 1-10 scale of berserk with hissing, growling, and throwing himself at the window screen to get out and make sure that dog caught some claws. Neighborhood cats will stroll by and he'll look at them and follow them around window to window but there was never any hostility behind it. This dog though seemed to be the kitty's crack-ping moment and ever since he's been spraying around the house mostly near windows and doors. He has also been showing increased hostility towards his brother cat. Any suggestions on how to get him back to normal?
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Apr 15, 2022 17:26
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You can try to calm him down with feliway or something like it, but if he's still pissing around a week after the inciting incident it's probably vet time. There's anti-anxiety meds for cats nowadays that will calm them right down. If you don't want to go to the vet yet, you can also try to wear him out by playing, and occasionally roll him into a towel burrito and cuddle him until he chills out, but presumably you've already tried that.
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Apr 15, 2022 22:25
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He's never been one for the burrito treatment so we've been making it a point to give him extra attention in general. This afternoon he was finally playing normally with the other cat and seemed a lot more at ease. There was one more marking incident this morning so hopefully that playtime is signaling the end of it.
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Apr 16, 2022 01:21
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Displaced aggression is a huge pain and there's not much you can do about it besides distractions and feliway, basically. Cats can be immensely territorial.
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Apr 16, 2022 01:26
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Bust Rodd posted:Good morning, I can finally afford to take proper care of these brats and I want to know if I should suck it up and buy the flea and tick preventative from my vet or pet smart that’s like 3 doses for $50+ or is there an effective solution I can buy online for cheap somewhere? I don’t wanna just look up whatever the first thing Amazon says is preferred, I know goons would have a lead on the good stuff for the best deal. I went through a bunch of off the shelf ones until someone here told me to try Cherestin and it absolutely destroyed the fleas in like a week… and it lasted about two years but now I’ve got Cherestin resistant fleas so I’ve switched to Revolution Plus that I need a vet RX for. Also, do not buy any medications from Amazon. There are counterfeits and too many reviews saying “this killed my cat”. Just buy it at Petco or Chewy or whatever. Crocobile posted:Do you let your cats outside (indoor/outdoor or on a leash)? If your cats are indoor only you shouldn’t need to give them flea medication. At least that’s what my vet told me 👀 Depends entirely where you live. My yard is riddled with them because I love in a swamp, so I’m constantly battling them in the summer even though the cats don’t go outside. Anyway, we had to rush my cat to the emergency vet on Tuesday. I wasn’t home but my girlfriend said he started howling and then collapsed. All they could find wrong with him was that he was dehydrated and constipated. We brought him home and kept him isolated to keep track of his eating and pooping. After two days he still wasn’t eating or pooping at a normal level so we took him back, and they’ve decided that he’s just depressed? He’s at the vet now and they have given him fluids and an appetite enhancer (did they just get him stoned? Lol) Has anyone dealt with anything like this? He’s got everything a cat could want. Even a kitten he zooms around with. He gets tons of attention even though his whiny older brother likes to hog the spotlight. I tried some cbd treats a while back but none of them would touch them.
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Apr 16, 2022 18:01
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Oh boy…. Mini-Scratcher caught and ate another mouse tonight, after taking a few nights off from the slaughter to let his other conquests digest, I suppose. This time my roommate was already asleep, though - he’s the one who mercifully delivers the coup-de-grace on the half-dead mouse that Mini won’t stop heartlessly toying with. Left to his own devices, Mini would let it run away a little bit and catch it repeatedly for hours, until the poor thing lies there with its chest heaving, unable to move - we’ve seen it! I suppose a captive mouse is pretty much the ultimate “cat toy” in a sense? Anyway, I had to ultimately put the mouse out of its misery this time so Mini would finally stop playing with his food and eat the drat thing. Not a very pleasant experience, reminded me of feeding my brother’s pet snake as a child - yet oddly the death of mice for sustenance didn’t seem to bother me quite so much, back then. Watching (and hearing) Mini eat the thing is pretty horrific, mostly because of the crunching sounds the bones make  As someone who does eat steak once or twice a week for dinner, though, part of me accepts this carnivorous behavior as a matter of course, and even feels a great deal of pride in my cat being such an efficient hunter and consumer of what he hunts - wasting absolute none of the kill is, after all, an admirably ideal policy for any hunter.
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Apr 17, 2022 09:26
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Shroomie posted:I went through a bunch of off the shelf ones until someone here told me to try Cherestin and it absolutely destroyed the fleas in like a week… and it lasted about two years but now I’ve got Cherestin resistant fleas so I’ve switched to Revolution Plus that I need a vet RX for. *raises hand* Yes, this sounds familiar. Back at the end of last year, one of my nineteen year old cats started having issues with her depth perception, which meant she couldn't always see the water in her bowl. She gets extra water in with her wet food twice a day so I wasn't worried about dehydration at the time and my vet gave me some suggestions to help her see/smell her water and things were fine for a while. Then in February, was a series of three ER trips over the course of the month; not eating all three times and the second was severely constipated. All three times she got fluids and bounced back. My vet eventually came to the conclusion that this was all from dehydration. Cat gets dehydrated, cat gets depressed, cat stops eating, and cat develops other problems. So the solution she gave to me was fluid therapy; basically, you get a bag of fluids and learn to give them to your cat yourself once a day. Yes, this involves needles and no, your cat will very likely not be happy about it. But there is no question that it has helped her get back to acting like herself and eating like a pig, and best of all, no more expensive ER visits. So you also might want to start paying attention to your cat's water intake to see if it's a dehydration related issue.
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Apr 18, 2022 00:35
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I mean, since we took in 25 rabbits from a poo poo situation and became really loving familiar with small animal physiology and (I learned and my wife re-learned since she used to vet tech) got used to doing sub-Q fluids, we've pretty much always had a bag or two of fluids on hand, plus a few dozen needles for doing so. Between the two of us, we are fully prepared for such an event; if dehydration is a concern, I'd get on that poo poo with your vet right quick. They are not going to like it, you may need a second set of hands, and the bubble of fluid under the loving skin is weird looking but it's worth it to save a fluffy feline life.
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Apr 18, 2022 15:29
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In my experience cats don't give a poo poo about fluid injections. Obviously if the cat is feral or hates any contact that's a concern but if it's a typical cat they'll take it like a champ. They don't even jump from the needle stick.
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Apr 18, 2022 17:12
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Hey Pet Island. I have cats, and they are doing great, but I also have carpenter ants and that's no good. Can anyone recommend me a safe product to get rid of the ants? I'm finding conflicting information about whether or not ant traps are safe due to the tiny amounts of borax within so I figured I'd ask here too.
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Apr 19, 2022 00:05
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Det_no posted:Hey Pet Island. I have cats, and they are doing great, but I also have carpenter ants and that's no good. Can anyone recommend me a safe product to get rid of the ants? I'm finding conflicting information about whether or not ant traps are safe due to the tiny amounts of borax within so I figured I'd ask here too. Edit: I missed that you mentioned borox, but I’ll let it stand. Edit again: If you’re nervous, put the sugar water/borax / traps in a cabinet or under a glass or something so the cat can’t get to it maybe. Borox based. The borox should be too small a quantity to hur cats if they eat it. Some ants might not like the the taste of the product below, but there are others out there you can try, and gobs of recipes online. If the ants eat it, it works (Ime carpenters like this stuff): https://www.google.com/shopping/pro...5040636332,cs:1 Otteration fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Apr 19, 2022 |
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Apr 19, 2022 03:16
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pidan posted:It's possible to get fleas as an indoor cat, mostly since they can come in with people, but I'm sure there's some unlikely transmission vectors I'm not thinking of as well. But putting them on preventative treatment for that reason seems a bit overkill. Mine got them twice, both times after my getting a shipment of electronics parts from China.
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Apr 19, 2022 20:45
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Is it safe to give cats the oil from a can of tuna every once in a while? I normally get tuna packed in water, which is evidently safe enough based on past experience, but the last time I was at the store I had to get the olive oil-packed kind. I imagine at the very least it will make his stools a bit runny, but I want to make sure it won't do anything worse than that.
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Apr 20, 2022 18:09
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Otteration posted:Edit: I missed that you mentioned borox, but I’ll let it stand. Cool. Thank you.
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Apr 22, 2022 06:49
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Meaty Ore posted:Is it safe to give cats the oil from a can of tuna every once in a while? I normally get tuna packed in water, which is evidently safe enough based on past experience, but the last time I was at the store I had to get the olive oil-packed kind. I imagine at the very least it will make his stools a bit runny, but I want to make sure it won't do anything worse than that. There’s absolutely nothing about or in olive oil that is remotely toxic in any way to cats, so don’t worry too much. You’re pretty much right that the worst that can happen to your cat from eating olive oil is diarrhea, or maybe a little vomiting, but nothing more dramatic than that. Apparently, a very small amount of olive oil on a weekly basis can be beneficial to cats with hairball issues, go figure. On a somewhat related note, I’ve been feeding my cats slices of raw beef tenderloin lately which I’ve been cooking for myself a couple times a week. It amazes me that they’re so discerning about cuts of beef - if I give them cheap raw hamburger or a chicken leg it’ll take them a couple hours to getting around to eating all of it, whereas the raw filet is gone in *seconds*. Kitties know what’s good, I guess!
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Apr 22, 2022 14:36
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I'm the worst about giving tiny bits of fancy food to the cats. Kimchi doesn't really appreciate it but Katya has known the taste of caviar and it's what she deserves.
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Apr 22, 2022 14:52
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kaworu posted:There’s absolutely nothing about or in olive oil that is remotely toxic in any way to cats, so don’t worry too much. You’re pretty much right that the worst that can happen to your cat from eating olive oil is diarrhea, or maybe a little vomiting, but nothing more dramatic than that. Apparently, a very small amount of olive oil on a weekly basis can be beneficial to cats with hairball issues, go figure. Thanks for the reassurance; good to know it may actually be of some small benefit as our fuzzbutt has had hairball issues in the past, significant enough that our vet suggested switching food formulas.
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Apr 22, 2022 16:08
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Does anybody have a favorite cat cave/cat tunnel? Diana loves hiding. We don't have enough floorspace for that thing that velcros to a pad and can be reconfigured.
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Apr 23, 2022 04:33
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We have this really simple one from Ikea: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lurvig-play-tunnel-for-cat-white-pink-70464874/ it folds up so we store it under some furniture and take it out every now and then for play-time. it's a big hit, they try and ambush each other in it and love to run through it to get to a toy on the other side.
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Apr 23, 2022 10:20
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Does anybody have a favorite cat cave/cat tunnel? Diana loves hiding. We don't have enough floorspace for that thing that velcros to a pad and can be reconfigured. I think honestly any of them from amazon even are going to do the trick. The one that came in this big kit specifically has a crinkly material in it which Quill loves:  The collapsible ones have little strings that you use to tie them shut which Quill also loves for a different purpose: https://i.imgur.com/k4I6cfF.mp4
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Apr 24, 2022 19:04
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The ones with strings are good for lashing tunnels together too, so you can make big hamster tube networks for your cats. My only recommendation is move them around a couple times a week, it freshens things up for the cat and it becomes a whole new toy. They will eventually get bored with it and completely ignore the tunnel, so collapse it down and hide it in a closet for a couple months. When you bring it back out it's going to be thrilling to them again.
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Apr 24, 2022 19:08
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xzzy posted:The ones with strings are good for lashing tunnels together too, so you can make big hamster tube networks for your cats. Totally, we also kinda push them into each other and we have a couple so we can create interesting systems of tunnels for Quill to destroy us from. I suspect this is all cats but she thinks she's invisible when her head is in the tunnel, so you'll see her entire rear half sticking out of the tunnel, tail wagging like crazy waiting for one of us to walk by the other end.
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Apr 24, 2022 19:32
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