Animals and Pets

Palio has settled in nicely. He's a very calm puppy and has already mastered house-training (no errors [so far, knock on wood]), crate-training (a little rough seas at the beginning but all good now), and the wooden stairs to the second floor (all by himself without encouragement). He's complying to simple commands (sit, come, heel, go crate, go poop, go chow). Our main struggle is puppy proofing the house now, as he is proving extremely adept at finding everything we don't want him to and carrying it, if he can, to his crate. I expect he's going to be an excellent dog.

Don't flush your pets, people. That's how we get toilet gaters.

At the beginning of June, we lost our whippet Snug to old age - he was 17. I wasn't expecting a new puppy quite this soon, but here he is: “Palio”.

Found this li'l friend while weeding this morning. They were a little nervous at first but decided to hang out for a bit, as I'm a great mosquito attractant.

https://imgur.com/2U36oaX

This little bugger has been hanging around my SO's workplace. She's absolutely attached to us and would show her belly every time we try to pet her. And it's not a trap! She loves belly rubs.

Now we wanted to adopt her for a while and have been taking care of her, vet visits, vaccines and all. We really want to have her in the house but we already have a cat (who'd love some company) but house rules allow for just one.

We also have a yard which is cat-friendly with shelter, places to sleep in, climb and scratch, and not directly on the street.

We know she's used to her environment and our worries are that she'll run away and try to go back to her old place, which is right on the street where her sister perished by a car at an intersection.

How can we go about this?

he's no longer a puppy (but he is the youngest of my dogs at four years old) and named after the Mario character. I wanted something nerdy but that people wouldn't immediately find hard to pronounce or remember.

one of the calmest dogs I've ever met, even though he's part dutch shepherd.

(also don't mind the ttrpg books on the side.)

This is Ziggy and he probably hates you. I love him though.

his body too small for his gotdang head

She heard a firework while grooming and stayed like this for a full minute. 🤠

He also goes by Sir Edgar the Fluff.

I adopted a new kitten approximately 4 months ago; Mister Black. He was an older kitten, and has had persistent diarrhea since I brought him home. I don't need advice in this regard - all options are being explored with a vet and I've spent many hours trawling the web for potential solutions. The vet's opinion is that he's all-around healthy, minus the diarrhea.

He's got definite crackhead energy, and receives plenty of play to wear him out to the point of panting. Still, he will occasionally go directly from cuddling to biting or clawing my legs. I'm starting to suspect his original home may have played with him using their hands. I respond with yelps, removing myself from the room or re-directing to a toy, but it doesn't have any lasting effect.

I already had another cat, Mister White, who's frankly spoiled me with his good manners and gentle spirit. I've had him since he was a tiny kitten just ready to leave mama, and he's a year older than Black. The two of them can hang out supervised, but White distrusts Black after he's tried to roughhouse one too many times. They were introduced slowly with scent swapping. Their playstyles are completely different, so I haven't managed to find a way to play with them together (Black enjoys adrenaline and muscle play, White enjoys stalking and chases with no contact). They can eat together just fine, although Black has to be actively discouraged from eating White's food.

Black is being castrated next month, which I'm hoping will help alleviate some of his issues (It's taken this long due to waiting for his medical issues to resolve). But I'm concerned that it might not - in which case, where do I go from here?

tl;dr: kitten is Satan and old cat is Jesus, what do?

ETA: It's worth adding that I have 18 years of experience with cat ownership with multiple different cats, and I haven't experienced anything like this before.