Kat Klub

[Tortoise]

Vinny, have your cats ever tried to get to the rats or gerbils, or are they just curious to look?

[vnatale]

Vinny, have your cats ever tried to get to the rats or gerbils, or are they just curious to look?

All my cats are always EXTREMELY interested in the gerbils.

When I brought home my office gerbil last Tuesday and put it in my other bedroom because its home was not cat proof like the three other three gerbil homes all three cats were immediately in the bedroom, like a vacuum, all over the gerbil's home. I yelled at all of them to get out, physically sent each one of them out, and the door to that bedroom has been kept shut.

They are constantly expressing interest in the other three gerbils' homes but they are all well secure and catproof.

The curious thing is that while the cats are pawing at the glass of the gerbil homes the gerbils seem to be completely unaware that a cat is just on the other side of the glass.

Rats are a different story.

They are much, much larger than the gerbils.

The cats sometimes have gone up to the rats home and, when they do, the rats run up to their wire walls and the cats jump back. I think the cats must recognize that though they'd love to kill and eat a gerbil, the rats are a whole other order of magnitude.

I'm actually more afraid of the cats getting too close to the rats home, heaving their tails within reach of a rat, and a rat biting it. But I've never seen anything like that come even close to happening.

I hand feed all the rats and I got bit once (by accident) drawing blood when it bit on my finger thinking it was a piece of food.

Vinny

[dualstow]

Rats are a different story.

They are much, much larger than the cats.

[vnatale]

Rats are a different story.

They are much, much larger than the cats.

Vinny

Wait, whaaaat?
How much do those rats weigh? In the pictures they look like they are smaller than Guinea Pigs.

Fixed it! "They are much, much larger than the "gerbils"!

Vinny

[Kriegsspiel]

Rats are a different story.

They are much, much larger than the cats.

The cats sometimes have gone up to the rats home and, when they do, the rats run up to their wire walls and the cats jump back. I think the cats must recognize that though they'd love to kill and eat a gerbil, the rats are a whole other order of magnitude.

I'm actually more afraid of the cats getting too close to the rats home, heaving their tails within reach of a rat, and a rat biting it. But I've never seen anything like that come even close to happening.

I hand feed all the rats and I got bit once (by accident) drawing blood when it bit on my finger thinking it was a piece of food.

Vinny

Rats were another scourge to be endured. They feasted on corpses and carcasses in the trenches and in no-man's land until, some said, they were as big as cats and twice as bold. Men shot them, bayoneted them, poisoned them, and beat them with clubs but in the long run to no avail. They multiplied like, well, rats. One story, perhaps apocryphal, is told of the soldier who found a cat in Ypres and brought it to his trench hoping it would get rid of the rats. Next day the cat was gone; only its tail remained, sticking out of a rat hole.
- Groom, A Storm In Flanders

[vnatale]

Rats are a different story.

They are much, much larger than the cats.

The cats sometimes have gone up to the rats home and, when they do, the rats run up to their wire walls and the cats jump back. I think the cats must recognize that though they'd love to kill and eat a gerbil, the rats are a whole other order of magnitude.

I'm actually more afraid of the cats getting too close to the rats home, heaving their tails within reach of a rat, and a rat biting it. But I've never seen anything like that come even close to happening.

I hand feed all the rats and I got bit once (by accident) drawing blood when it bit on my finger thinking it was a piece of food.

Vinny

Rats were another scourge to be endured. They feasted on corpses and carcasses in the trenches and in no-man's land until, some said, they were as big as cats and twice as bold. Men shot them, bayoneted them, poisoned them, and beat them with clubs but in the long run to no avail. They multiplied like, well, rats. One story, perhaps apocryphal, is told of the soldier who found a cat in Ypres and brought it to his trench hoping it would get rid of the rats. Next day the cat was gone; only its tail remained, sticking out of a rat hole.
- Groom, A Storm In Flanders

I was a member of a natural foods cooperative. At night the cockroaches would take over the place. At a board meeting we were told that a gecko eats them. So we obtained one. We later fund it dead. Since then I've always told everyone that we bought the gecko and then the cockroaches assassinated it!

Vinny

[Kriegsspiel]

Rats were another scourge to be endured. They feasted on corpses and carcasses in the trenches and in no-man's land until, some said, they were as big as cats and twice as bold. Men shot them, bayoneted them, poisoned them, and beat them with clubs but in the long run to no avail. They multiplied like, well, rats. One story, perhaps apocryphal, is told of the soldier who found a cat in Ypres and brought it to his trench hoping it would get rid of the rats. Next day the cat was gone; only its tail remained, sticking out of a rat hole.
- Groom, A Storm In Flanders

I was a member of a natural foods cooperative. At night the cockroaches would take over the place. At a board meeting we were told that a gecko eats them. So we obtained one. We later fund it dead. Since then I've always told everyone that we bought the gecko and then the cockroaches assassinated it!

Vinny

The Western Front: 1
Grocery Store: -1

I subtracted a point.

[Cortopassi]

emachines computer? My God, what are you running a 386?

[vnatale]

emachines computer? My God, what are you running a 386?

I was wondering who you were directing it to.

Now I see it must be Smith1776.

It looks like it has an 80GB hard drive. So I'm guessing it is definitely a Pentium and was purchased around 2010 or so.

Vinny

[CT-Scott]

When I saw this thread was 3 pages long, I expected to find a lot more photos inside. Oh well, here's one of my two cats eyeing a chipmunk outside:

Cats2.jpg (125.43 KiB) Viewed 7911 times

[vnatale]

When I saw this thread was 3 pages long, I expected to find a lot more photos inside. Oh well, here's one of my two cats eyeing a chipmunk outside:
Cats2.jpg

You ALSO have a classic black cat! I love black cats. Seeing your black one from behind could fool me thinking it is one of my two black ones.

Vinny

[dualstow]

When I saw this thread was 3 pages long, I expected to find a lot more photos inside. Oh well, here's one of my two cats eyeing a chipmunk outside:

Code: Select all

Cats2.jpg

I read this and thought, so who owns the other cat in the picture? And then, ohhhhhh. One picture of my two cats.

[Tortoise]

here's [a photo] of my two cats eyeing a chipmunk outside:
Cats2.jpg

Do your cats make those funny chirping or chittering noises as they stare at animals outside?

[CT-Scott]

Do your cats make those funny chirping or chittering noises as they stare at animals outside?

Yes they do (I think just with birds)! And it's funny because I don't remember any of the other cats I've ever had (and I've had several over my lifetime) do that. But we're out in the woods here, so they have the opportunity to see a lot of wildlife/birds.

[CT-Scott]

You ALSO have a classic black cat! I love black cats. Seeing your black one from behind could fool me thinking it is one of my two black ones.

Yes. Like yours, she's got a white bib.

Our two cats are supposedly sisters (we got them from a rescue when they were kittens), and they used to like to snuggle, but now it seems like the black one, especially, doesn't like to be bothered by her sister.

[WiseOne]

Vinny, I am somehow not surprised that you have a massive CD collection. Nice! Also love how they double as cat trees and perches.

Here's how my cats are reacting to the coronavirus pandemic and the shelter-at-home order. They sure know how to live! p.s. I had the odd idea that *I* would be enjoying this nice upholstered chair. My cats had a different opinion. I'm allowed to use it only occasionally.

chai sleeping.jpeg (53.06 KiB) Viewed 7969 times

[Smith1776]

D4175E6F-5B5F-48CC-8730-B0FDDE39E410.jpeg (415.49 KiB) Viewed 7961 times

[Smith1776]

emachines computer? My God, what are you running a 386?

I was wondering who you were directing it to.

Now I see it must be Smith1776.

It looks like it has an 80GB hard drive. So I'm guessing it is definitely a Pentium and was purchased around 2010 or so.

Vinny

Hahahaha it's a 2004 or 2005 machine. It originally shipped with:

- 2.93GHz Intel Celeron D w/ 533MHz FSB (90nm Prescott generation)
- 256MB of ram
- Intel Extreme Graphics 2
- 80GB HDD

After several years of upgrades it ended up with:

- 3.2GHz Pentium 4 w/ 800MHz FSB (also 90nm Prescott Generation)
- 1GB of RAM
- GeForce FX 5500
- 80GB HDD with 40GB constant external attached.

I drove that thing hard and did all kinds of crazy things with it. Everything from experimenting with keystroke loggers to running games that it had no business running. It ran everything from Windows XP to my misguided attempts at hackintoshing it. Good times.

[Mountaineer]

I still have this - Dell™ Dimension™ 8400 Series from about 2006. Upgraded memory and HDD a couple times. It even runs latest version of Windows 10 satisfactorily (but OS upgrades do take a while). I sometimes play with Linux distributions on it via USB memory stick. My current favorite distros are Mint and MX Linux.

Sorry for the thread hijack, everyone can go back to their cats now. Our last cat died quite a few years ago and we did not replace him. I came home from traveling one day and found him in the basement, stone cold. His remains are in our flower bed.

[CT-Scott]

This past Saturday we noticed our two cats fixated in front of, and peering under, my A/V rack. My initial thought was that they had gotten one of their toys stuck under there. I got down on the floor (causing my cats to leave the room), flashed a flashlight under it, but the gap between the carpet and the bottom of the lowermost shelf was pretty small, so it was hard to see. I saw something that looked like it could be a mouse, but it wasn't moving, so I suspected that it was a toy mouse. I shook the A/V rack and it darted out. Oh great.

My 21-year-old daughter asked me not to kill it. I told her if the cats can corner it and stun it, I would hopefully be able to scoop it up in a box and toss it outside.

I tried to get my cats to come back to the room to help catch this thing. I spent the next hour moving furniture around, removing baseboard heat covers, etc., and in the midst of it all, we lost track of where it went. Eventually, I had to give up. Behind the baseboard heat covers I could see that the hole in the wall to accommodate the hot water pipe was large enough for a mouse to travel, and figured it might have escaped through there. I placed an order on Amazon for some copper mesh to shove in the hole later.

The next morning we noticed our cats peering under our kitchen fridge. I guess the little guy is under there today. I didn't feel like pulling out our fridge (which was overstocked for the zombie apocalypse), so I hoped that eventually one of the cats would handle it.

This morning, we hear one of the cats crying outside of our bedroom door (we don't allow them access to our BR - our house is big enough that they have plenty of room to play/explore). The cats usually don't start crying at our door unless we've been in there for an extended time in the morning, but we had just woken up. Still, I didn't really think anything of it. My wife goes down to make her coffee and yells upstairs for me to come downstairs as soon as possible. "Is it the mouse?" I asked. "Yup," she yells back.

I go down there and in the middle of the living room is a dead mouse. My wife tells me that when she first went downstairs, our gray cat was circling it and crying. We can't say for certain which cat was responsible (it could have been both, even), but I suspect it was the gray one, as she was always a particular fan of, and possessive of, the toy mice (the black one, OTOH, is addicted to the laser pointer dot).

My daughter didn't get her wish, but our cats have finally proven to be of some value to the house (other than the affection they provide in small doses).

[dualstow]

Nice job, cats!
I guess that’s why the Egyptians “made” them in the first place.

[CT-Scott]

My first concern was whether our cats had eaten any of it. I wasn't sure what sort of affect that might have. Without getting too graphic, it looked like it had been severed in half but on closer inspection it looked more like a stripe of hair/skin was ripped off of it, but it's insides were not exposed. But I didn't look too close at it and disposed of it as quickly as possible. I *was* a little surprised that she didn't personally deliver it to the outside of our bedroom door.

[WiseOne]

Nice, CT-Scott! Great that your little furballs came in handy for your Great Mouse Adventure.

My cats have killed one critter each, while in my mom's backyard being walked on leashes. One cat flushed out a rat from the next door neighbor's rock garden and went after it with great gusto. He got it in his mouth and killed it, then held it while growling and spitting like a freight train. i swear he became a much more confident cat after that - before that, he was a bit skittish after having a really traumatic experience as a kitten (bowel obstruction from a toy). He's also the one I'd vote Most Likely to Kill a Mouse, just from the way he plays.

I know I have mice under the stove, but they don't venture out beyond that - the cats are great deterrents. They sometimes camp in front of the stove daring one of those critters to come out.

[dualstow]

Mice love food hoarders.

We dont have any in the house since renovating (knock on wood), but I can see them in the garden every day while there used to be just a few sightings per year. There was no winter to kill them off.

I don’t know if my cat would kill them or make friends. She’s definitely infatuated with them.

Mice, the Other Plague.

[vnatale]

Nice, CT-Scott! Great that your little furballs came in handy for your Great Mouse Adventure.

My cats have killed one critter each, while in my mom's backyard being walked on leashes. One cat flushed out a rat from the next door neighbor's rock garden and went after it with great gusto. He got it in his mouth and killed it, then held it while growling and spitting like a freight train. i swear he became a much more confident cat after that - before that, he was a bit skittish after having a really traumatic experience as a kitten (bowel obstruction from a toy). He's also the one I'd vote Most Likely to Kill a Mouse, just from the way he plays.

I know I have mice under the stove, but they don't venture out beyond that - the cats are great deterrents. They sometimes camp in front of the stove daring one of those critters to come out.

When I had an older cat and mice under my refrigerator, I put him in front of it but he just sat there like nothing was going on. I'd guessed it was a combination of him being too old and getting plenty of his expensive prescription dental cat food so he did not need to hunt for his food.

Totally different story with these three young ones I now have.

I used to ALWAYS see signs of mice activity in various places in my house. The first winter I had these three cats, I saw ZERO signs. I thought the mice who did venture here quickly left and put out the message to all the rest of the mice in the neighborhood that my house was NO longer a safe house for mice.

This past winter the cats did get two that were in my bedroom. Tried to save one by giving it its own aquarium home but it did not last long and died.

One morning I was laying in bed and heard furious activity in this bedroom among the three of them. I quickly got up to see what they were then looking at and saw one of my gerbils sitting underneath my electric piano amplifier.

I quickly threw all three cats of the room and shut the door.

Miracles of miracles it only took me only a few minutes to catch it. Gerbils are extremely quick and my bedroom is the ultimate haven for which a gerbil can hide -- even out of the reach of the cats. He then got reunited with his 3 other gerbil-mates and they all seemed to be quite happy to be whole again.

Final mice story. Last Tuesday when I last shopped for food I stocked up on some semi-perishables, e.g., oranges, and I put them in boxes in the basement, since its cooler there. On the top box I put some old expensive ferret food in hopes that any mice in the basement would get their fill of that food and not bother with my food. A week later that ferret food has remained untouched so I think the word is back out there that this is NOT a safe house for mice. There is, though, some unidentified animal continuing to come into my garage to eat the ferret food I put in the bowl.

Vinny

Vinny