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Cats: Feline Balancing Act — 3 Comments

  1. Your patience and love for these animals awes me! We have one cat, who lives in the garage at night. No idea where she is in the daytime. I worry that she is getting old, but she isn’t interested in the house. She’s not averse to being petted, though she’ll walk away after half a minute or so. She “talks” to us–and boy, does she let us know if her food and water dishes aren’t to her liking! Her fur is extremely thick, and she’s got a knot on her flank that’s going to require scissors to remove. Sometimes she gets hurt–probably by another cat, but with the woods behind us, there’s no real way of knowing for sure whose teeth marks those are.

    What we do have is three dogs. Dogs are different from cats. No way could we have seven dogs in the house. Dogs don’t have a lot of “sit still” in them. They are busy, noisy, and tend to leave their toys all over the place. They don’t fight, though. When we added the third dog to a stable two-dog house, there was no fighting over who was alpha. The third dog took a “job” about halfway between the little dog–who communicates with humans–and the big dog, whose attention is devoted to squirrels. Sometimes the third dog will help the little dog tell us what they (all three of them) want, but other times, she helps Big Dog bark at the squirrels. Third Dog got injured last month–it looks as if she was stabbed, but of course we don’t know what really happened–and has spent the last six weeks trying to heal up. She has been coned and bootied and kept in her crate so as not to pull the stitches loose again. She is slowly returning to “active duty”–we were worried the social order of our “pack” would be upset, but they are all shifting around to return to the pre-injury corporate chart. Oh, golly. Look how much I’ve nattered on!

    • Dogs are a completely different dynamic. I miss ours, but now is certainly not the time to contemplate adding a dog to the mix.

  2. You’re right about that.

    Our dogs are pretty well cowed by the cat, who weighs maybe 10 or 11 pounds. She’s small and has a naturally short tail. Her only kitten that we know about is a virtual clone of her, except that he’s male.

    Only the little dog will go anywhere near the cat, and that’s with a lot of watchfulness. The big dog, who weights over 80 pounds, will stop dead in his tracks and not go near the cat. The dog, though big now, was smaller than the cat when he first came here, and Cat wasted no time in showing the puppies who was boss around here. Middle-sized dog was pretty well grown when we found her, but she has absorbed the other dogs’ view of the cat. Or maybe the cat did something we don’t know about. We have no game cameras!

    Animal societies are complex, but then, so are human ones. Otherwise, what would we write about?

    Good luck with the raccoon-proof feeder system. 🙂