Have you ever heard that mournful, spooky, hollow-sounding MUURRAAOOWW, that male cats sometimes make when prowling around ? I have a usually meek (neutered) gentleman cat with a generally a polite “mew” voice, who sometimes takes off, prowling the house, crying this bone-chilling call. My little dog doesn’t like it, ( or maybe it just sets off some primal feelings of her own) and she emits something between a howl and a high-pitched squeal. She howls and howls along with the so-sad Murraaoows. It’s really quite hilarious…a year-round Halloween entertainment! Except when it happens at 4 AM!
Well, I’m solidly awake now, with little chance of going back to sleep, so tell me, what odd and funny things do your pets do?
Once my large dog ate a $20 bill and pooped it out in the yard. Ex-H picked it out with the scooper and rinsed it with the garden hose. It sat on a paper towel in the kitchen for a few days until it disappeared. I asked H were it was, and he said he deposited it in the bank. Me: (slightly horrified) “Did you tell them?” H: “Nope.”
My female cat does the mournful howling sometimes. DH thinks she is upset because she thinks I’m not in the house. When I call her, she usually stops and comes where I am.
There was the time I bought two 5-pound bags of flour and left them on the kitchen counter. One dog pulled a bag off, dragged it through the doggie door, and they proceeded to eat all of the plain flour. I have a great picture of one of my dogs with flour all around his mouth looking guilty as all get-out.
One day I heard a crash. By the time I got to the kitchen, all that was left of the rotisserie chicken I had just brought home was the container lying on the floor. Our two dogs sat on their haunches, looking completely innocent. I called the vet and he said to bring both dogs in because they would need x-rays (chicken bones were the concern). Our yellow lab had nothing in her stomach, but our 30 lb. golden doodle had the entire chicken in his stomach. The vet said it looked almost intact; he had never seen anything like it. That dog had to stay at the vet for a week, getting serial x-rays to monitor the progress of the bird through his body. He came out of it completely okay, while we came out of it with a huge bill.
My very old dachshund was on steroids, with the accompanying hunger. My kindergartner had a friend over, and theyy were playing Monopoly, when the dice fell on the kitchen floor, and the dog grabbed and swallowed it. I threw everybody in the car and headed to the vet, thinking that it was going to be his last car ride. In the back, the girls are discussing how are they going to play Monopoly without the dice, and the friend telling D that she had dice at home, and how maybe we could stop by her house to pick them up. The vet xrayed him, saw the dice, and said that he would try to get him to vomit it up, otherwise he needed surgery, because he was too small to pass it through. Also, since he was so old, he probably would not survive the surgery. So we gave it a go. The vet put morphine into his eyes, and eureka! We got the dice back in a prescription bottle, and always referred to the dog again as “Nathan Detroit”. And he lived another 2 years until he was 15! My favorite dog memory!
My dog (a medium chow/lab) routinely will hit up the fridge and sometimes the pantry. The first time he hit the fridge I didn’t notice because what he ate was a stick of butter and the wrapper was behind the sofa. The second time he stole the boars head turkey. Still he hid the wrapper. Did I mention he closes the door (or it closes on its own?)
Nowadays as we leave the house we “secure the fridge” which consists of taking a large cardboard box (that had held a chair) which has been dismantled so that it is a cardboard piece about 5 feet by 3 feet. We wrap that around the fridge (front and around the sides) and put a big hand weight in front of it. That works. Sometimes when I am not home but others are he will still break in. Last week my husband found broccoli, a cup of yogurt, and mushrooms on the ground…looks like he ate mushrooms. When we were late feeding him because we were at a family party he got in and pulled out 3 of the “cups of ramen” my kids love into the center of the dining room but did not open them.
I was at the emergency vet hospital helping the techs take care of our dog after his surgery, and a huge Great Dane came in for observation. Apparently, the techs already knew him as a notorious garbage eater. This time, he shredded through and ate the contents and a chunk of a large garbage bag… the techs had a field day looking at the X-ray trying to figure out what was in his stomach.
My Co-Workers 160# hound of some sort got into a bag of lolly-pops, she brought in pictures. The stick with the wrapper intact, still stuck to the stick but every ounce of candy was gone. Co-Worker says the dog nibbles with her front teeth, can strip a bone or an ear of corn like a sharp knife.
When we were in grad school my husband and I had a cookout for fellow students, a bring your own meat to grill and dish to share kind of thing. There were about 40-50 people sitting on the ground with plates on their laps or beside them and a table full of food dishes but the german shepherd was good as gold. He stared mournfully at everyone’s food but didn’t touch any of it even though he easily could have. Then someone at the grill dropped a brat in the process of attempting to put it in a bun. The dog had that brat caught and swallowed before it hit the ground.
My little dog used to bury himself in the laundry pile. Clean laundry, where I would pile up several loads full and everyone would dig in and fold their own stuff.
Once he emerged all tangled in bras and couldn’t walk without landing on his face. So sorry I didn’t get a photo of that one.
I swear my cats have an internal clock. They become excited and begin to circle the auto feeders 2-3 minutes before the time those contraptions are set to dish out the kibble. It is like a shark feeding frenzy!
My cat seems to lack that internal clock completely. She will set up next to the automatic feeder up to two hours before it drops its 1/4-cup load. I often explain to her that she has plenty of time to do something else before the food drops, but usually she ignores me. She is very inventive about trying to get at the kibble when she wants it (which is always), rather than when the feeder wants her to have it (8:24 am).
She is a beautiful, adorable, snuggly calico cat with a strong Hannibal Lecter streak. Once, on the covered walkway just outside our kitchen door (her normal ingress and egress point), I found the following laid out as the corners of a near-perfect square, 2’ x 2’: a headless chipmunk body, a neat pile of chipmunk guts, a faceless chipmunk skull, a chipmunk face.
Lots of funny stories, but first a little creepy one. We had been fostering a dog for about 5 months, a really mellow, cuddly Italian Greyhound mix. One morning he suddenly jumped up and started barking furiously towards the kitchen wall (an interior-facing wall, so he wasn’t barking at something outside the wall). This went on for a solid 5 minutes before he calmed down. Cue requisite jokes about dogs seeing ghosts.
Ok now the part that makes it creepier. A year later we adopted a dog, another pretty mellow one. You guessed it, one day while I’m eating breakfast she’s facing the same spot on the same kitchen wall and suddenly backs up 2 steps like she’s scared and starts barking like crazy! Again went on for a solid 5 minutes before she settled down. Uber creepy.
So now a funny story to balance that. Our silly dog likes to chew up throw rugs by the doors, pulling out strings and swallowing them. One day I’m sitting outside while she’s taking care of business. Suddenly she comes whining to me doing a weird squat-waddle. Yup, a piece of string was hanging out of her butt! I had to pull it the rest of the way out. Good times.
We had a client at our family run veterinary clinic come in…a local preacher with a fat chocolate lab named “Moses” who was suffering nausea and straining. Thinking he was constipated or clogged up with impacted spare rib bones (he was a trash hound)…our vet slipped a finger up his fanny and pulled out…a purple condom.
The preacher turned fifty shades of purple, too…as one by one…17 condoms were pulled out of that dogs rear end…with the last seven or so combined in a giant condom balloon animal knot that had caused the blockage. To make matters worse…Moses groaned obscenely with each removal. (at least he was getting some relief)
There was no foul play…no one suspected nonconsentual pervy acts…clearly the dog just liked to raid the bathroom trash and swallowed what he found…but it was absolutely hysterical. The rest of us were taking turns hiding in back so we could laugh out loud.
