Here is a pic of a recently departed pooch who died last week, so I thought I would throw this up to cheer up the owner:
Just try to move a Great Dane off a couch. I challenge you. In other news, I apparently did not put my toothbrush in the holder last night after I brushed my teeth, and when I woke up this morning I walked into the bathroom and saw Tunch sitting squarely with his butt right on the business end of the toothbrush while he was drinking out of the sink (despite having a water fountain
Krista
I wonder if Tunch felt minty-fresh afterwards…
Screamin' Demon
Tell me about it. I’ve got a cocker spaniel who’s destroyed pretty much everything I own. And yet I still love the li’l bastid.
Betsy
To the owner of the departed pooch – so sorry. He or she looks like an awesome dog.
Joey Maloney
Well, at least you didn’t have to wait to develop your vacation snapshots to discover Tunch’s malfeasance.
jnfr
Beautiful doggie. Skritch, skritch.
Betsy
My cat and I have a longstanding battle regarding a makeup brush. Because she is not allowed to have it for her own, she considers it to be the single most desirable object in our home. She is unrelenting in her attempts to steal it away and/or attack it viciously.
dollar general spice
What a nice-lookin doggie. Condolences to the owner of this fine canine specimen.
Krista
Awww…that doggie looked like he was such a sweetie, and a great big baby.
A Mom Anon
My cat Aleister has decided that he actually owns me I think. He gets between me and the hubby at night with his back to me and pushes all 4 paws against hubby til he’s moved an appropriate distance away. If he’s not here,Al will sleep in the doorway to the bedroom and stands guard. He’s also pretty much destroyed my favorite chair,so I guess that’s how he’s making it up to me.
schrodinger's cat
My orange tabby cat is methodically destroying all my books, she loves to sharpen her claws on the book spines and yes she does have a scratching post which she pointedly ignores.
dollar general spice
There is definitely something about drinking water straight out of the tap. I had one who was obsessive about it for a while. Luckily, I do not leave my toothbrush out. :)
Miriam
Wow – what a sweet dog! I’m so sorry to hear of your loss. That is one of the best dog pictures I have ever seen. It is easy to tell that this dog had a lot of loving to give.
My cat actually takes my toothbrush out of the holder and chews on it – so I need to leave it in the cabinet.
Keith
For cats, yes. For dogs, no (and this is coming from an owner of a 60 lb mass of pure muscle…dogs are MUCH easier to break).
My cat story for the day involves going into the kitchen to make a sandwich for lunch, and my bag of sandwich rolls from the bakery was torn open with half of one chewed up. In fact, I have to store their dry food in the microwave because they will climb into any cabinet (even the top ones) to get into food. It’s a constant struggle that I’m always losing.
J.
Great dog. (Looks a bit like Scooby-Doo.) My condolences.
So by "drinking out of the sink," John Cole, do you mean like this? You must have a pretty big sink…
aimai
Have you asked yourself yet how many times Tunch has done this and then put the toothbrush back in its holder?
aimai
gex
What a great dog, what a damn shame to lose him. My deepest sympathies to his family.
booda
I was awakened this morning by my labrador kicking me in the face during a dream. Did I get mad and kick him off the bed? Oh no, I simply flipped him around and we spooned for another hour or so.
Yeah, they own the place.
Ash Can
Condolences to the owner of this doggie. What a splendid pooch.
schrodinger's cat
Lovely doggie, with such big beautiful eyes! My condolences to the owner.
Incertus
At least with my cat, it’s just my office chair I have to give up for long stretches. If I roll him over to the recliner, he’ll move, but only after stretching for what feels like ten minutes. Thank goodness I have a laptop.
And this image ought to become the official reply to Republican whiners everywhere.
EdTheRed
I’ve got an 11-month old son…he recently became very mobile and very curious, resulting in my wife moving the cat’s food and water bowls to a different corner of the room last week.
The cat’s response? A relentless campaign of "carpet bombing" (strategically placed deuces around the various first-floor carpets) that shows no sign of abating. It’s wife vs. cat in the ultimate battle of wills, and I’m just laying low and cleaning up sh*t.
JenJen
Beautiful dog. My sympathies to the owner… losing a pup is absolutely heartbreaking. :-(
libarbarian
Cat-Butt is a great cavity fighter.
comrade thalarctos
Cats don’t have owners.
Cats have staff.
Comrade Darkness
@A Mom Anon,
Aluminum foil is the best defense. If you tape it on the irresistible parts neatly with clear packing tape it doesn’t even look ALL that bad.
But that aside, cats do serve the zen-like function of classifying material goods as meaningless. It’s easy to forget that without them on constant duty to remind you.
donnah
Our cat loves to read the newspaper with me in the morning. And by "reading the newspaper," I mean sprawling her significantly sized self all over the pages. I don’t mind giving her attention, but I’m usually on a schedule that allows only a quick read and then I have to go to work.
I see it as her master plan, one in which I must bribe her with treats to get her off the paper. So I come off looking dumb, she gets treats AND she reads the headlines before I do.
Stoopit kitty!
John PM
Same goes for kids, especially if you have more than two. Two will band together to distract you while the third goes into the office, grabs a red pen and starts writing on all your work papers. When you ask what happened, the culprit, with red ink stained hands, will say "I don’t know." Because he is so darn cute and is the youngest, nothing will happen.
Comrade Darkness
@EdTheRed,
Nature’s Miracle is fantastic stuff, if you haven’t discovered it yet. Has enzymes to eat the scent, otherwise they will keep going in the same place.
Have you tried giving the cat some dedicated attention away from the kid on a schedule of some kind? He sounds like he’s at war with more than the dish.
Ben
We have a Great Dane. And we have managed to keep him off the couch.
Granted, we have to keep our dining room chairs on the couch, legs up, but whatever.
He sleeps on his bed on the floor and simply waits… waits for the day when we forget to put the chair on the couch. And that’s when he will make his move.
BigSwami
Another vote of disagreement about dogs. They can be a handful at first, but with persistent discipline they’ll end up very respectful of your things. An old dog is just about the best roommate in the world, and I’ll pugilize anyone who says different.
Geeno
You don’t move a large dog off the couch. You lay down next to him/her, feel the love, and take a nap.
For best results slide in behind the dog – it looks hard, but as long as they know you’re not evicting them, they’ll let you do it.
Notorious P.A.T.
My heart goes out to the owner of that dog. He looks like he had a good, long life. I hope he did.
LOL
Geeno
Cats are only untrainable, because we tolerate it. You can’t have a big strapping dog doing whatever it pleases, so you train it. Cats are small, there’s an upper limit to the amount of damage they do to our stuff, and we tolerate it. Cats are actually very trainable if you care to take the time and effort – yes it is more time and effort than dogs, but it CAN be done.
Notorious P.A.T.
Sounds like you need those child-proof cabinet locks. Actually someone should market those toward cat owners.
Geeno
And yes, my heart, too, goes out to the owners of that dog. S/he looks eminently cuddleable.
Mike in NC
If I want to watch TV at night it usually means having to fight a 15-pound cat for my favorite chair or sitting on the floor…
Brian J
Apparently, John McCain is going to be Twittering with George Stephanopoulos for "This Week." I’m really not sure what the point of conducting an interview with someone via Twitter is, but there you have it.
As far as pets go, that’s pretty true. I don’t have a problem with my dog sleeping on the couches as long as she doesn’t have an accident on them, but even one that is as skittish as mine ignores me when I tell her to get off if she’s in my spot. My dog will look up, stare at me, and then brush me off never to bother with me again until she’s hungry.
R-Jud
@Comrade Darkness:
I second this. We’ve been vigilant about fussing over the cats at a certain time each day since our baby arrived and I think that attention is the only thing keeping them from leaving protest poop in the cradle. That and bribing them with tuna.
Also, my condolences to the owner of the late, great Great Dane. My brother has one and he is the kindliest four-footed critter I know (the dog, I mean: my brother runs a close third).
Mr. Poppinfresh
I have the flu currently, and have therefore left the litterbox a little overfull- not bad, just a day or two overdue for a cleaning.
This morning, I awoke to find a veritable wall of fresh, stinky, wet cat turds in a ring around the litterbox, proclaiming my failure as a pet owner.
They didn’t even look ashamed.
Mike in NC
Because they’re a couple of twits?
b-psycho
Didn’t have a dog for a long enough period of time, but I did have a turtle. I understand the loss.
Since this is an open thread: I’m shocked, the S*c**l*st dude in WaPos chat actually got & responded to my comment. I’m the one from Jefferson City.
John T
I like cats but these anecdotes about toothbrushes and "carpet bombing" are precisely why I don’t own one. Or why I am not owned by one, whatever the case may be.
Krista
I’m definitely more of a dog person. For starters, at least you don’t have to worry about them getting up on top of your cupboards. My mother’s cat is awful for this. Damn thing gets up on everything, and nothing grosses me out more than knowing that litter-box-crusted paws have been up on my countertops. My folks were over this weekend and brought their cat (despite knowing full well that I’m allergic), and I made very good use of the water spray bottle.
I like nice cats. We had one when I was growing up, and he was a sweetie and a perfect gentleman. But unfortunately there’s really no way of telling what you’re going to get. What seemed like a sedate, docile, snuggly creature at the shelter could turn into a whirling, biting, climbing beast from Hell as soon as you get it home.
gbear
I got up a little earlier than usual this morning so had a few extra minutes to pay attention to the cats before I left for work. I had just started petting one of them when I heard the dreaded ‘urp, urp, urp’ coming from the other side of the room, and I looked up just in time to see the other cat blow breakfast on the carpeting.
All of that extra kitty bonding time got spent cleaning the carpet. Meanwhile both kitties had run upstairs to avoid their now-crabby owner (ok, staff). Some mornings I’m not a big fan of cats.
mr. whipple
My late great cat would only drink from running water. I had an old clawfoot bathtub and he figured out he could use his head to butt the levers until the water came on.
Being a cat, however, he never cared to turn the damn thing off when he was done.
mr. whipple
We’ve got a female that whenever she’s gonna puke, heads to the highest spot in the room(dresser, bookshelf, whatever) so she can spew her chunks as widely as frigging possible.
b-psycho
My brother has a cat. Two in fact. I remember one time being at his place for a cookout, & at one point his wife set a scrap of meat on the floor for each of them — at which time one cat smacked the other one in the face & ate both.
JenJen
Oh, my… President Obama laying smack down on AIG, on live teevee. Good stuff.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
Open thread?
The Obama-Geithner appearance on your tv now is a home run. Sharp, intelligent, even witty, and talking to specific financial measures aimed at the heart of the next year’s real economic risk … the risk of widespread small business failure.
Try to see the entire thing later on video if possible.
Ricky Bobby
I’m sure that you realize this now John, but pets think all the stuff we buy them (waterfall, specialty food dishes, etc.) is teh ghey. Why would they want their own stuff? They want OUR stuff to drink from and eat from.
The only time you need things like pro water bowls, sleeping beds, food bowls and stuff is if you are traveling and leaving your pets for extended periods. Then they just sleep on your bed/couch anyways, so all of that is moot as well.
Comrade Mary AWOL
Oh, what a sweetfaced dog, and what a terrible thing to lose him.
I had to have Fergus put to sleep last week. He started heaving more than usual last weekend, then stopped eating, got checked by a vet, started eating again, stopped eating again, got x-rayed and exploratory surgery on Friday, and, as agreed beforehand, wasn’t woken up from surgery because things just looked too awful.
But he wasn’t hungry, wasn’t in pain, and wasn’t left alone, so while I really miss the little bugger, I knew we did all we could for him.
http://tinyurl.com/cw7wr4
ET
And the everything includes you. My cat has taken to crawling up my chest and sitting on my shoulder/chest. Which would be OK if he didn’t make sure and obstruct the view of the book I am reading.
And don’t get me started on what he does to my new Netbook when the Pipes screen saver activates.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
@mr. whipple:
Cat regurgitation is a survival thing. The cat eats as much as possible, which is more than it needs right now, and takes the overload to a safe spot to regurgitate it for eating later. This keeps other animals from getting the food during the interim.
When cats live with other cats, this behavior can become pretty constant and annoying to say the least.
The remedy is to feed in small amounts and not let the cat eat enough to trigger the response. With multiple cats, this is a pain in the butt, but it’s easier than cleaning up regurgitated food.
Notice that this is not vomit, the food is not digested, it is usually regurgitated within a very few minutes of eating.
Comrade Darkness
@Krista: But unfortunately there’s really no way of telling what you’re going to get.
That’s not true. Just adopt an adult from the pound and introduce yourself to each cat before choosing. We have the absolutely sweetest grey and white shorthair (that coloration does tend to go with sweet personality) we got that way that even anti-cat people admit would make an okay pet. Our vet has signs up with entire paragraphs detailing the personality on cats their clients can’t keep and need to get a new home for. I’m always tempted, but two really should be the limit.
Comrade Some Guy Named Mattski
Thank you John
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Mr. Poppinfresh: Gah. I have two LitterMaids that I service (take out the old, add more litter, etc.) once a day.
That’s not good enough for BotherCat (the thousand-dollar "free" kitty we rescued off the street). Every other day I will find a nice pile of fresh turds right in front of the litter boxes.
Whatcha gonna do? The rotten little beast owns my heart.
dollar general spice
Geeno, so how is this done, this cat-training? Please share. I have been waiting desperately for the Cat Whisperer for years now.
Krista
Oh Mary, I’m sorry to hear about Fergus. And you’re right — he wasn’t hungry, in pain, or alone, and he had wonderful care and lots of love right up to the end.
We should all have such a dignified and comfortable ending.
dollar general spice
I love these stories, btw. It’s good to know I am not the only one out there who is completely owned by my pets. I was starting to feel a bit dysfunctional.
Comrade Darkness
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko,
have you tried a totally different kind of litter? something with a soft step, sometimes the grains are tough on their paws.
I had this trouble for a while til I discovered that the other cat was ambushing the older cat when she left the covered box, so she stopped going into it, and did like yours does. So, I left the lid off one of the boxes and the problem was solved.
Oh, and our cats are trained. Absolute consistency is the trick. NO exceptions. Clap your hands right in front of their nose when they are very bad. They hate that. Mine change what they are doing if I just sternly say, "hey" at this point. I have one fat and one skinny cat and I was pointing out to the vet that I can’t make one diet without starving the other, and she said, oh, just set the bowl up high where the fat one can’t jump up and I’m like, but they never jump up on anything, they’re trained not to. To which she stared at me blankly. My SO trained them to come on different whistled tunes. Scares the guests, that does. The fat one comes on darth vader’s theme… heh.
dollar general spice
Gotcher 3 survivalists right here on the couch!
sarah
@Comrade Mary AWOL: condolances for all pet owners who lost their loved ones.
my cat loves her drinkwell water fountain, and is taking to toilet training like it’s catnip. and ever since i stopped giving her wet food in the morning (just when i get home from work now) she’s been a sweetheart in the morning and only prods me when i oversleep my alarm. She only indulges in bad behavior when I’m too lazy to stop her. Which is often ’cause I’m a pretty lazy owner (see: pet fountain & toilet training & liking to sleep in).
however i have to wonder, John. how did Tunch turn the water on in the sink? Because if he has opposable thumbs claws in addition to that deadly looking maw we saw in a previous post… you have one deadly kitteh on your hands.
mclaren
We’ll be joining the pooch soon. Suicide looks attractive. Better than starving to death homeless under an overpass, certainly. And now that Obama has sided with the monsters of the previous maladministration by affirming that the president has the ability to hold people without charges indefinitely and torture ’em, it’s important not to let yourself get dragged into that government torture chamber alive.
The American experiment was fun while it lasted. Now it’s over. Now we’ve got an emperor instead of a republic, and the absolute dictates of the emperor instead of the rule of law. Right now, we have a good emperor — comparable to Augustus. Soon enough, though, we’ll get a Caligula or a Commodus. Best to draw a warm bath and cut your wrists before 2016 or 2020, when a Caligula comes to power.
dollar general spice
Just fyi, the warmest part of a cat’s noggin to smooch, if you are so inclined, is the temple area, between the eye and the ear where the fur is thinner. *smooch*
dollar general spice
RIP Fergus – that is a great name for a dog and he looks like a Fergus (pets)
Krista
You’re probably right. My folks and my sister had both adopted kittens, and did the "get-to-know-you" thing before choosing, but the cat’s behaviour as a kitten, while surrounded with other cats who may be dominating it, really is no indication of how it’ll act when it gets home and is the only cat in the house. But at least with dogs you do have a certain amount of breed guidelines to go by, if you have an idea of the ancestry of the dog. With cats, you usually don’t have that genetic indicator.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@R-Jud:
Your brother has four feet?
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
My son, a junior in college, got a dog last August, thinking it would be tonic for his broken heart. Because, really…. every college student in an apartment needs a dog, right?
Of course, it lasted two weeks, and now it resides at my house. Our dog, Blaze, a 120 lb. Lab/Newfy mix, is possibly The World’s Best Dog: gentle but protective, well behaved to a fault. The son’s doggeh, Dr. Dre, is, I’m sad to say, a complete moran with no redeeming qualities.
I can handle the occasional chewed up shoe or raided garbage can. But last week, he got my Grado SR60 headphones , which were hanging on a hook on the wall, chewed them into tiny pieces right outside our bedroom door, where he was proudly waiting to greet me in the morning.
Let me emphasize that I’m not advocating this, but: in the farm country where I grew up, dogs like that were known to suddenly go missing.
Bootlegger
AIG execs are going Galt and daring Obama to do something about it. Will Obama act like the pet owners here whose pets own the owners, or will Obama own the pets and train Wall Street to jump to his tune?
gnomedad
Hold him accountable, sure, but if I see much more of this I’m signing up with the Church of the Obamessiah. I refuse to believe — yet — that Obama doesn’t basically mean what he’s been saying about torture, respecting the Constitution, etc. W has had eight years to plant land mines. Give the man some time to find and disarm them.
Comrade Darkness
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon), a stupid cat is far more livable than a stupid dog. Our sweet cat is also about as dumb as a stone, but this makes him easier to live with, rather than harder. He doesn’t plot. You can only put him on about 1/5 the cues you can put the smart one on. But really. Cat’s don’t need that many anyway.
Zuzu's Petals
@Keith:
I use a container with a screw-top lid. Raccoons could probably figure it out … cats, not so much.
TenguPhule
Can we get a response from those who own cats, ye or nay?
TenguPhule
I favor putting them to sleep and adopting new ones.
Kathy
My beloved beagle Shiloh died in August (the same week I moved to a new apartment), along with one of my three cats — the sweetest cat that ever drew breath.
The grief is difficult to put into words, but clearly I’m among people who know.
My heart goes out to the owner of that beautiful Great Dane.
Joe Max
Trunch behaves so much like my cat Grendel, who also has a water fountain in the kitchen, but will whine piteously to get me to turn on the tap in the bathroom. And if I don’t (and forget to close the bathroom door) he’ll claw all the toilet paper onto the floor.
As a friend of mine likes to say, "dogs have owners, but cats have staff."
AhabTRuler
True, there are plenty more bankers at the pound. Just be sure to spay/neuter your banker. I’ll do it for free, but I don’t use anesthesia…or sharp edges.
joe from Lowell
Mmm…assey fresh breath!
Quicksand
Well, in the sense that cats are not generally tall enough to see out the windshield and operate the pedals at the same time, I guess you’re right that cats can’t wreck your car, at least not directly.
Anyone here have a Bengal Cat? They are relatively large, athletic, demanding, and infatuated with high places. Ours likes to push things off high shelves to get our attention.
So all things considered, NAY. It’s a different kind of damage than dogs tend to perpetrate, but not necessarily smaller.
Cat Lady
No upper limit regarding furniture, at least. Cats don’t destroy my shoes, boots, underwear or tip over and spread trash around, but man, what they do to the furniture is a sight to behold. I have cat hair on my cat hair on everything I own because I have one particularly "helpful" cat, and the other one pissed on everything, including beds. The pisser likes the new cat litter, I got, though, called Dr. Elsey’s Cat Attract. It works!
So long beautiful great dane. I hope you see my old buddy Bert where you are now. I miss him every day.
CaseyL
Condolences to the families of that sweet looking old Dane, and of Fergus. I’ve lived with kitties long enough to have had to make that awful choice a few times; it never gets easier.
I have 3 kitties now. Ariel is 18, the last surviving member of the original multicat tribe (RIP Shana, Rococo, Copper, Jazz, and Pamela…) She’s under strict instructions to live forever, because losing her will break my heart.
ET
TenguPhule – mine knocked a diamond and sapphire ring down the sink and I never notice. I no longer have a diamond an sapphire ring.
dollar general spice
Can we send a shipment of Cat Ass Toothpaste to the AIG execs as a bonus?
R-Jud
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
Certainly seems that way. Or at least hand-feet. First rule of being my brother: See a tree or a wall? Climb it.
Bad Horse's Filly
As one who knows, there is nothing quite as empty as a house that has lost its Great Dane. My condolences.
Laura Clawson
I have a cat that has no interest in furniture higher than a couch or bed. He’ll jump onto a low window sill, but that’s the extent of it — won’t even go up on the table that’s by a window.
Highly recommended.
Et Tu Brutus?
Open Thread, you said: A fresh young NYT columnist apparently doesn’t like blonds!
Who knew?
Geeno
@Quicksand:
Please. I’m a cat owner – Ive had stuff shredded out of spite, but that’s very rare even in a poorly behaved cat. A poorly behaved dog can trash all of your furniture in a few hours, and he’ll do it again tomorrow if you let him. I’ve seen couches literally ripped apart – framing and all – by a 2 year old sheppard* who didn’t like being left home alone; I’ve never seen a cat do that.
* not my dog – I kept telling the owner "get it trained ASAP", but it was so cute and no trouble at all….
Terri
My heartfelt condolences to those of you who have lost your pooches. That is a day that truly sucks.
My grandmother used to say, one of the ways to measure your life, was by the memories of the good dogs you had.
I just had to replace one side of a set of bamboo window shades. An unsupervised green winged macaw had great fun turning them into expensive toothpicks. Fucker.
Comrade Nikolita
@Comrade Darkness:
My cat unfortunately has gotten a little skittish when I raise my voice, but our kitten has taken to backing off when I say either his name (Tac) or "Hey!" in a stern voice. And if I snap my fingers at him, he knows to stop doing whatever he’s doing because he shouldn’t be doing it.
Anne E
Heartfelt sympathy to the Great Dane’s owner. He looks beautiful. He also looks old, so hopefully he had a long, good life. I lost one of my five cats two weeks ago, and it sucks.
I cannot agree that the evil cats can do is limited. I teach a community college class Saturday mornings, and once- just once- I left a pile of corrected student exams on my desk. In a folder, ready to be put in my briefcase in the morning.
When I went to retrieve the papers, I discovered that one of my cats had flipped open the folder, scattered the top three, and barfed on all three! Talk about embarassing.
John, anyone who owns a cat should follow three rules:
(1) Always have a spare toothbrush.
(2) Never get down to your last set of work clothes.
(3) Never walk away from a plate or cup without securing it so cats can’t get to it.