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Cat and Luna!

1K views 13 replies 5 participants last post by  GP Person 
#1 ·
Any advice about getting 14 week old puppy (Luna) to ignore the cat? He’s a good cat and extremely tolerant, but seems to enjoy playing with Luna and doesn’t always run away. He actually comes back for more. She’s usually not too rough for the most part, but sometimes does make me a little nervous that either she will hurt him or he will scratch and hurt her. He has plenty of places to retreat to but is extremely people oriented and wants to be around everyone.
 
#3 ·
When I lost my old dog it turned out that both the cats and I weren't ready to not have a Doberman again. So I borrowed a puppy from a friend.

He was nearly six months old and while he had a lot of training for many things he'd never lived with a cat.

Forward another six months. This is the only dog I've ever had that wears a collar full time. And that's so he has my hand in his collar when he goes from room to room with me. While he's now much better with the cats this puppy turned out to be long on prey drive and while my cats wouldn't always run from him, if they did, it was "game
on!" But now he does leave the cats alone when I tell him to.

And now the cats voluntarily come into the room to visit him and the cat who was most attached my old dog has taken to marking the borrowed puppy--it mystifies him because he can't believe the cat will approach him, rub back and forth across his legs and feet. The other cat--who is very old and who has raised and lived with Dobermans most of his 17 years--now will sit on my bed (where the puppy is not allowed) and let the puppy wash his ears).

It'll go faster with a younger puppy but keeping the puppy on leash is a good idea anyway and I used to use an x-pen when I had a new puppy or new dog who didn't know about cats and I was trying to get something done--I'd drop the puppy in the pen and the cats would come and stare but were out of too much attention from a rambunctious puppy.

Good luck--with some help from you they'll work it out.

dobebug
 
#4 · (Edited)
Young puppies are mostly hyperactive and would want to interact and play with any possible living being if they have the possibility. But I perfectly understand your concern, and cats tend to be a little nastier if someone bothers them. And those claws are no joke! I was beginning to become a little worried when one cat started showing up at our place, he would sunbathe in the garden, but he would also make a mess with each visit. I actually had to Google How to Stop Cats from Pooping in the Garden (Full Guide) | Pests Banned to get tips on stopping that cat from damaging my garden. And I was also worried about letting my pup out cause he would definitely want to play with the stranger cat.
 
#5 ·
Two years from my last post about dogs and cats. My very old cat is long gone and the young cat has worked out a deal with the dog--who will still chase him if he runs. But now Clark (the cat) only runs sometimes from the dog (Joey).

So if Clark runs, Joey chases him and Clark has already got a place to go that's out of reach--(shades of a long ago cat who used to teach the puppies a cat game where they got to chase the cat down the long hall to the bedroom but the cat then got to chase the puppy back up the hall and into the kitchen where no one got to chase anyone else.

And now when I let the dog out to pee before breakfast or dinner, the cat who has already been served his breakfast or dinner will jump down from the counter (where he's fed so that the dog doesn't vacuum the food from under his nose) and hang out at the slider, complaining to me from time to time, that he can't eat until the dog comes back and gets his meal too.

Watching the cat do things like washing the dogs ears if the dog is lying down so the ears are within reach--which the dog likes so he stays prone but rolls his eyes like a drama queen while this goes on.

The interactions provide me with enough entertainment that it's worth the pain in the neck training that goes into keeping the dog from running over the cat or squishing him with a big paw.

dobebug
 
#10 ·
You're lucky to know people like that. When it comes to taking in an older cat, I can't say anyone I know would do it. My last Rotties have been co-owned, so Teagan, the only one I still have, is safe. The contract for Gibbs says he goes back to the breeder if anything happens. Things like that are among the unsung extra blessings of getting a dog from a good breeder.

How did something that terrible happen to Clark's tail?

Hope it's okay to chat like this in an older thread.
 
#11 ·
I think it's OK--the mods will speak to that if it's not.

What exactly happened to Clark's tail is a mystery. The parents were lying all along saying he was an indoor cat. They blew the whistle on themselves when they said he came in, in the morning and his tail looked like that.

Tail degloves are not uncommon although with the change of the way windows work these days they are less common than in the past. One of ways tails got degloved was when an older style window's mechanism for holding it partially open didn't function well and a window came down on a cat coming in or going out that kind of window. Sometimes it would slam down with enough force to amputate the tail but sometime is came down on the tail just enough to slice through the upper and lower skin and pin the tail and then the cat in an effort to get free (you can image how painful that must be) would rip all the skin off of the tail.

There are other outside things that can pin a cat's tail and the effect is pretty much the same--cat vs car engines is another common place to start a degloving .

And they are painful--very! One of the reasons I kept Clark is that I was the one holding him on the exam table while our vet looked to see what kind of an amputation was going to be needed. (Fortunately he had enough tail with skin still on t that she could leave two or three vertebrae, clean up the skin and still have enough skin to adequately cover the stump. So Clark has about the same amount of tail that a good Doberman dock has.) But he was so good while she was touching parts of his raw tail and not fighting us at all--gives you some idea of the kind of temperament that cat has.

He was only 14 months old and a sweetheart. And the cost of euthanasia was only marginally less than an amputation.

And our clinic has always had a bunch of soft touches--I'm not the only one. Our ultrasound tech has been taking home cats turned in by neighbors when they were abandoned--most of them were old males some intact, some already neutered but every couple of years we'd get one of these rejects in and Dan would take it home, give it a great couple of years before they were sent on their way. And one of our vets started taking home a cat that was abandoned in the clinic--overweight, diabetic and as he lost weight he needed constant monitoring to see if he needed insulin today--eventually she started keeping him at home and now we only see him if their family goes on vacation.

People who work in vet clinics are often the saviors of cats and dogs like Clark--all of the cats I've gotten in the last 16 years were rejects of one sort or another--one was completely feral--some partly so--but they find homes with the employees.

dobebug
 
#12 ·
That's truly terrible. I'm glad he's such a sweetheart and got himself into a super home.

The vet savior thing -- years ago the vet I took my Akitas to became a friend, and he admitted to me he'd had some people bring in a cat that had been hit by a car who wouldn't consider anything but euthanasia. It was a young cat and so nice in spite of multiple broken bones, he hid it in his basement and told them he'd done the euthanasia and accidentally sent the body to the disposal people before they came for it. (I guess they weren't people to stick around and comfort a cat as it was PTS.) I saw that cat around the clinic first with pins sticking out of its legs from the bone repairs and then for years after as a clinic cat. I suppose that violated some ethical or even legal requirements, but it was back in the late 60s or early 70s, and that vet isn't with us to be prosecuted even if some righteous soul wanted to.
 
#13 ·
The better clients, if they absolutely can't keep a cat for any number of reasons (one of my client rejects came in with ringworm--his elderly owner was in tears--she'd adopted him from the Oregon Humane Society and didn't want him to go back there--his soft touch vet had her sign him over--bought the necessary ringworm medicine and he spent almost 8 weeks in our infectious ward. I obviously spent too much time chatting with him--he would see me through the glass panel in the ward door and throw himself on his back and knead in the air--you could hear him purring all the way into the hall. After he had three clean fungus plates he came home with me. Yeah, there's a sucker borne every minute.

And we kept some of the rejects as clinic cats. We are a County drop off for animals picked up injured--one of them was a grey adolescent neutered male--broken pelvis and a tire track across his body just in front of his hips. We kept him--one of our vets operated on him (amazingly enough there was no organ damage and only the pelvic fracture. Cats are experts at healing fast. In three days he was dragging himself into the litter box.to pee. And because he was young he healed fast. He became Prescot--named for the street that Animal Services picked him up at. We had him for over 10 years--one of the tech's taught him to catch cat treats when someone would toss them to him.

Soft touches are where you find them...

dobebug
 
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