I’ve got an elderly cat that became my responsibility through… circumstances.
He’s a lot of work. He has zero personality or charisma. Worst of all, he harasses me for wet food his whole waking existence. Food motivated is not the word, it’s the only thing he knows, or cares about.
I’m not going to be sad when he dies.
Some pets are just assholes.
Had a cat, adopted as a kitten. She was well cared for at all points, socialized, well fed, vet visits, all the stuff you’re supposed to do. Lots of playtime, toys, petting, etc. I have always had a cat through my life, I know how to take care of them. She pissed wherever she wanted, constantly. Back to vet, nothing wrong, she’s just a cunt. Pills, feliway, whatever, pissed on my wife’s coat, the walls, plants, pretty much would only shit in the litter box. Cleaned it daily, tried different types, different litter, etc. Wife had knee/ankle surgery for a cartilage transplant. The night we get home, she’s sick, puking, in pain, was clearly discharged too early. That’s the night the cat pissed all over the pillows and bed. Wife had to sleep on sofa, I slept on floor. Had to throw away pillows and an expensive down comforter that would not come clean. Also the coat.
Got rid of that cat the next day. Fuck that cat. You can say stupid shit like “you should have tried xyz!!!”. You try living in a catpiss soaked hell and then see how much sympathy you have for a fucker like that thing.
Not exactly but they all get old and whiney eventually. Same as us I guess. I didn’t LOVE my husband’s dog, he didn’t train her well, but I did like her ok.
I did have a kitten so evil I might have taken him to the pound except I couldn’t catch him. He would go into unreachable spaces and piss, would hiss at anyone who approached, was just a wee spitfire demon straight from hell. But one day he metamorphed into a gorgeous long haired tomcat, sweet and gentle and smart. He used to give me kisses with paws on my cheeks, no claws. Was jealous of men, but otherwise an utter delight of an adult cat.
When I was 4 or 5 my parents had a dog. Don’t even know what kind of dog it was. All I know is it bit me on the face. Enough to cut my cheek open. And from that point on I didn’t like the dog, avoided the dog, just…fuck that dog, ya know.
At some point the dog was outside and got hit by a passing UPS delivery truck. I remember my parents being beside themselves, trying to explain to me that we were never going to see Buttons again, and I could have not have felt any more indifferent.
Sad story time…
My brother brought home a young pitbull he found abandoned on the side of a motorway. The most likely theory was that it came from a traveler community and was abandoned because it wasn’t good enough at dog fighting. It was still young when we got it, kind of an adolescent.
That dog was nervous around all people, aggressive towards other animals (especially other dogs). But in particular he fucking HATED all teenage boys, probably because of the abuse he had suffered. And guess what I was at that time! Fun times!
I tried hard to befriend him, but he was so psychologically fucked in the head that it was a futile exercise. Every day I’d get home from high school and he would be snarling and bearing its teeth at me and quivering with rage/fear as soon as I walked through the door. I would say hi and he would get even more aggressive, and start following me around. So I took to ignoring him as much as possible. But even then he still attacked me several times. I figured out ways of reducing the damage and fending him off, but it was still not good.
I kept being my parents to get rid of him. Eventually they did, like after two fucking years of going through that miserable routine.
And yeah I did kind of hate that dog because he made my life very difficult. But I also felt really bad for him. He was screwed from birth and so psychologically scarred that he never stood a chance. We’re sure the shelter ended up putting him down because he was so aggressive and anti-social.
Fuck animal abusers!
Your family gave that dog a second chance at life for a long time. Someone just permanently damaged him before you guys met each other. Even if he never became a friend, you still gave him more moments of comfort and safety than he would have seen had you guys not taken him in. It’s sad he couldn’t recover, but if giving him up was the end of his story, you still gave him all you could before that.
Working in animal rescue, I think a lot about animals that can’t be saved, and sometimes a calm and peaceful end isn’t the worst outcome. You probably know all this, as your story makes you seem very compassionate, but just in case, you shouldn’t feel guilty. You guys went above and beyond what most would have done for that poor dog. ❤️
It happens to people sometimes too. I’ve had a lot of patients actually that are completely incapable of safely accepting help from another human. You’ll be just trying to get their own excrement off them before it gives them chemical burns and they’ll scream and claw at you the whole time then get covered in bodily fluids again within a few hours.
Less soul-crushing but in some ways more frustrating is addicts who are just never going to be ready to be sober within the bounds of support that are available and keep using the mental health system in ways it’s not designed for then yell at everyone throughout the entire process when they’re not getting what they want at that exact moment whether it’s more substances or more food or just to yell at someone because their life is legitimately awful and they don’t know how to cope with that in any other way than trying to make sure everyone else is miserable too.
A little over a year ago we got news that a patient that hadn’t come back for a while had managed to complete suicide this time around and I was just relieved to know their pain had finally ended. Clearly we weren’t helping so they did what they had to to find peace. When I talk to most people about stuff like this they just have 0 perspective like. Most of my interactions with this person were them demanding more Graham crackers at 2am then yelling at me if we were out. That was like. The main thing they were living for. The Graham crackers. They weren’t even capable of holding a conversation of any kind about things they liked to do, or even music they liked or anything. If you tried they’d yell at you. TF were they gonna get sober for they didn’t even have anything to live for…? They were literally just a shell of a human being and the only thing left inside was anger.
Those are good examples. I’ve never known serious addicts, but seeing how my grammom dealt with grandpa getting Alzheimer’s was very difficult, as they’d been married 70 years, so it’s not even like she could remember life without him, and then he was physically there, but mentally lost 99% of the time. She was relieved after he was finally at piece, but by then, so much of her felt taken away from her, she basically decided she wanted to not be here if he wasn’t and she essentially said her goodbyes to us and said she was going to stop her meds so she could be with him again. She was my fav relative, and was one of the few loving people I had growing up. But I knew for years she was miserable watching pop suffer and be lost and afraid. I told her she didn’t owe anyone anything and if she wasn’t old enough to make her own decisions, who the heck was? I miss her every day, but I think she was right to feel relief when pop was at peace, and it was right for her to decide she didn’t want to be in a world with half of herself missing.
My lifelong best friend just went through the same thing with his mother and a long bout of dementia. It was so physically and mentally demanding on him, his mom seemed very lost and upset almost all the time, and his dad was having all kinds of mental challenges coping with the situation and taking it out on my friend and the caregiver they hired, and as sad as it was to lose her eventually, everyone living’s life was in many ways, much calmer and stable and they were able to start healing. I miss her too, as I knew her since I was around 6, so almost 40 years. But much of her was lost to illness and was never coming back.
We also lost both my wife’s parents withing the last few years, and I was horrified at how terrible it is to be there while actively losing someone. I was at the hospital with my wife for both of them, and they both were essentially past the point of no return, but we all were there 12+ hours waiting for the physical process to be over. It seemed very demeaning to the person that was dying, and very cruel to the family to just have to sit there and wait for everything to stop instead of giving a loved one the peaceful and graceful end that we give to animals. I think I was more angry than sad, and I felt closer to them than to my own parents. It just seemed needlessly prolonged for all parties involved, and the family is getting mad at the poor nurses, because their hands are tied, so I felt bad for them too. Like, if there is no way they are going to recover, where is the humanity in making everyone sit there and watch that final suffering? It was just baffling to me how we can say that is cruel to let an animal linger like that, but we make families do that every day.
I tried not to go on so off topic for so long, but I get frustrated so many people refuse to talk about death until it’s right in front of their face. Some people act like I’m morbid or something, but it is an inevitability, and I think being mentally prepared for it is helpful because you won’t be in the right state of mind to think through anything when you’re on the spot facing it. It also leads to not having wills, insurance, and plans for many important things the surviving parties will need to deal with that also delays people healing from the experience.
Thanks. That perspective helps.
For a short time I was married to a woman who had a dog. This was the worst dog I’ve ever personally known. He loved to bite people, especially children. He would be cute and fluffy and wiggly until someone tried to pet him, and then he would do his level best to take a finger. I was #3 in her world, right behind her imaginary friend in the sky and her crazy dog, and she really wasn’t a nice enough wife to put up with being bitten multiple times a week in my own house. So we went our seperate ways. She married someone else not long after. He also left after being bitten multiple times a week. None of her family would deal with her, because of her dog.
My mother’s fucking feral cat.
spoiler
Yeah, it flipped out about 5 min before this pic and the hand is all bite-marks. Yeah, I’ve had cats all my life; even pure siamese cats, with nary a worry. We went directly to the A&E from there, and a quick few hours later got some “lift off and nuke it from orbit” kind of antibiotics and antiprotozoans; and while I was aggressively ill for about a day from the meds to save my ballooning hand from the bone-deep punctures laden with bacteria and protozoa, I’m all good now but for the permanent scars to my hand, wrists and soul.
Fucking cat. And I love cats, but that fucking cat.
We adopted two kittens many years ago, littermates, a male orange and a female black calico. The boy was full of personality and was playful, would accept affection, etc. the girl warmed up a little to my husband but otherwise won the “don’t give a fuck” war. She had the worst whiney meow in the morning calling for brekkie, and made me insane. We ended up moving states away and couldn’t secure housing that allowed pets so we rehomed both. I miss the boy, still to this day. But her, I do not miss. I hope they had great lives with their new people, they seemed happy to have them.
Long time ago, I had an indoor ginger cat. Rescue kitten. My girlfriend at the time kept teasing it, rubbing his belly, rough-housing with it. I kept telling her to go easy, but she thought it was fun.
Pretty soon, the cat learned about indiscriminate biting and scratching. All my family and friends hated being around him. I had to lock him up in another room when people showed up.
The girlfriend got a job out of town and moved out and I had to move to a place that didn’t allow animals. Fortunately, I found a friend with a farm who wanted to take him. Last I heard, he was having the time of his life riding on top of sheep and horses.
I once helped take care of a hedgehog when its owner was away. It didn’t like anything except being left alone under a blanket at day and at night, to creep out to crunch on some food.
I used to have an albino hedgehog pet (a rescue). Hedgehogs only care about sleep and food. And by all means, I get it.
It sounds like tis cat might have had food scarcity issues in the past. Are they overweight? If dry food was left out for grazing would they gorge themselves? Sometimes cats that are extremely food motivated will calm down with food that is always available to them.
Another thing that can help is disassociating you with the food. There are wet food auto feeders, which can help associate the machine with food instead of you, and stop them from harrassing you.
If they are food motivated, and have “no personality” you may have an opportunity to teach them tricks. A good one to start with is shake, because having something like a churu in reach makes then want to paw at it. Say shake, intercept the paw, and then give a lick of the churu. Repeat at the same time daily and you can keep upping the difficulty. This helps you bond with the cat, and you’ll likely see some of the missing personality shine through.
You’re a good person for taking care of that fluffer.
All of my brother in law’s dogs. Every last one of them has behavior issues because he doesn’t discipline them and they just do whatever they want, including jumping on the table, couch, all over people, barking incessantly, stealing food off the counter, chewing on shoes, pillows, and plushes, and just causing general mayhem.
I have not been able to sit down at any family gatherings there for many many years with the exception of meals, and even then it’s constantly fending them off. I stand the rest of the time so I don’t get jumped on. It’s a genuinely miserable experience being around those animals.
Never. At their worst animals are just something you meet them where they’re at.
I’d do anything to have mine back
yes but only when he was a literal psycho.
cat, black and white. missing 1 eye
overall chill, but approach him from the wrong side and he would flip out and attack you, and charge you if you tried to flee. only way to stop it was to ensure the little paws, scruff him and just let him flail until he calmed down.
first time it happened it almost went into a brick wall. 4 times he charged causing damage to leg, inner thigh, stomach, back, neck and arms and it was the forth one that took all my will to not smash it against a wall. if my girlfriend wasn’t there at the time…yeah…
he lived to be 11years old and passed naturally. good cat otherwise, just a chaotic cat.
My grandmother has a dog that we all hate… I feel bad about it though.
I loved all the cats I’ve had as pets.
