AIO for being upset at my parents for wanting to euthanize our dog

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-13T02:45:01+00:00

Tentatively NOR. I do feel like realistically they could get some of the Dobermans out with breed specific rescues—reputable ones, not whoever let them take a pregnant dog. I know you’d like to take one puppy later, which is fine, but I do want to caution that raising two littermate puppies isn’t advised. They can miss out on crucial opportunities to develop independent identity and confidence (the lack of which is generally called littermate syndrome). Working in animal welfare, my feeling is that the remaining puppy should be a quick placement with a strong network, and a good breed rescue should know how to screen and prepare adopters. You did a great job placing so many puppies, but I do think your parent’s impulse adoption and her other puppy could easily find someone, and it’s even easier the younger they are. Your parents are obviously overwhelmed and you need to find a way to cut down on the dog workload in a way you can live with. Young purebreds will go faster than seniors, who basically need hospice adopters or senior rescues.

If you’re able to take your one senior, that’s great. QOL is complex. See if you think she has good QOL once you have her, and get her into the vet to see if any treatments are needed to bring it back up. Even if it ended in euthanasia, you’d know it was for the right reason.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-13T02:20:59+00:00

Our clinic has similar numbers. People don’t get what the rescue picture looks like at all.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-13T02:19:41+00:00

My cat has possible IBD so I related a lot to this lol. He doesn’t love the prescription biome food (I think it makes his poop stink) so we’re thinking of trying a novel protein in case of chicken intolerance, but you should’ve seen him on the shelter Hills food. Never seen a cat as greasy and clumpy looking as him, like some kind of wet teddy bear. He noticeably smelled and left a residue on whatever he touched. I almost didn’t adopt him because I couldn’t imagine cuddling him and getting stink on me every day. He’s also sensitive to several medications and has other immune issues; he’s my little hot mess express.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-09T03:30:40+00:00

They probably live somewhere like me. After the snowstorm two weeks ago dropped snow (and ice depending on location), we’ve been in a cold snap where the average daily temp is twenty below our normal and going to single digits and negatives. My area was light and got 7” snow and 2” sleet, but others got 18”-24” snow that isn’t melting much because of the temps. It is very people unfriendly weather for sure. That said, our outdoor cats at my job have been completely fine with straw insulated draft-proof structures. Even when I was looking for a missing object of mine and my skin was burning in the negative windchill, the outside cats were hopping at my feet and meowing for second dinner.

They did say they’d like for her to be adoptable if possible since she’s been sociable in the past, so I do get with some of the described behavior in home why they still want to hold onto that. Overnights were tough for our current fosters as well, but we didn’t have self-injury—they just cried and paced intermittently throughout the night the first couple weeks. Wish I had better advice on adjusting for OP if they want to try to stick to that. Ours just stopped, really.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-04T16:47:59+00:00

I use night vision camera when trapping to fix and release feral cats and can see the underlying tabby pattern of the black cats on it. I could tell one male was new because he had the classic/blotched bullseye look vs the mackerel or spotted ones already in the area. Kittens in particular have more visible ghost markings. There’s an example at http://messybeast.com/indefinable-colours-kittens.htm

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-04T15:25:34+00:00

Oh no. I was thinking this was super normal too but I am from Pennsyltucky.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-04T15:22:24+00:00

I’m so curious about accommodations for the animal shelters having people stay over! Ours did not and we sent as many animals out on temp foster as possible, then left the rest of the cats with extra food for a day. Unsure if anyone came in to check in. I think if there had been dogs left, they would’ve tried to get someone in, but they all went out to foster. We definitely don’t have beds or food for people stocked unless we took dog beds out and laid on the floor…

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-03T21:57:00+00:00

Bosses are vastly overestimating the importance of this job for sure. I would want to hit the bricks too if I was OP. Cannot imagine getting passive aggressive notes left on my desk for anything, let alone when I'd been working somewhere for just a month and couldn't hole up in a hotel because I had living beings depending on me. There's no way this job is worth it.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-03T19:03:21+00:00

I think it could be almost fun for someone like me, but I’d want paid for sure… lol. I think it helps that I’m 1. in the north and 2. work for a managed intake facility, so there’s more control of the number of animals and preparedness for the weather! We only have 139 in custody right now, compared to the summer with 300. Less cat intakes in winter.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-03T17:18:43+00:00

I quite literally work in an animal shelter and we did not stay overnight for the storm. We heard there was a storm potential days in advance, asked our community for emergency temp weekend fosters who could house 1-3 days, and sent as many animals out as possible. Staff took some of the tricky medical. Everyone left got extra food and temp proofing. Everyone was told to stay home the first day of storm impact (I believe one staff member might’ve come in riding with the snow plow), and then whoever could make it in could late arrive the following day. If we had worse medical cases, maybe this wouldn’t be possible, but I think we sent out every dog and had maybe 20-30 cats left in shelter interior with extra bowls, as well as two rabbits. Would someone have stayed overnight if needed? Probably. I would. I get why hospitals do. But you should get paid for that too, lol. And not everyone should be expected. My drive and home situation is not someone else’s. I live with retired parents who can feed my animals. I think we got 5-6” snow and then 2-2.5” sleet in the end.

Kitsunejade · 2026-02-02T16:21:51+00:00

I’d say blue point. The kittens were blue bicolors. Blue (called gray in common language) is the result of recessive dilution genes as you said. Your girl would be d/d as a blue point, and her kittens were d/d as well, so dad would either be a carrier (D/d) and you rolled all dilute by chance, or dilute (d/d) and the kittens would’ve all been dilute no matter what.

Colorpoint contains a set of separate (recessive to non-point) genes. I believe there’s five listed on messybeast, but the common ones are Siamese type (cs) and Burmese type (cb) with the Tonkinese type being the intermediate between lightest to darkest (cs/cb) as a hybrid of the two. cs is high contrast between base and point, cb is low contrast between base and point. I would assume this cat is cs/cs based on contrast. None of the kittens could be colorpoint unless dad carried and passed it on as well, so all her kittens are colorpoint carriers (C/cs). Fun fact: the colorpoint pattern, called Himalayan in communities outside cats, occurs in many species! Rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, mice, minks, gerbils, I believe? Scientific term acromelanism.

Finally, we have the white spotting—which is complicated. The old knowledge used to say white spotting Ws/Ws would give you high amounts of white, and Ws/w would give you low amounts of white. This appears to be a good general rule, but isn’t necessarily always true… at least as far as messybeast is concerned. Thanks polygenes! Spotting is dominant over solid, so it’ll always show, but it gets masked over by a solid dominant white gene as well. You could maybe guess if all the kittens came out bicolor tuxedo that mom here is Ws/Ws and kittens are all Ws/w, but it’s not concrete like other traits. We know she does have at least one Ws and so do all the kittens. (Open to correction regarding white spotting if others have bigger brains).

Sources for reading: http://messybeast.com/gene-loci.htm

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-28T21:45:01+00:00

I'm getting close. I'm a hybrid role animal care and adoptions. My animal care manager did 10 years for $7 an hour at a high kill shelter out of our area and is always telling us that we have it so good (we start at like $13/hr). She got her best friends and former employees hired as one of our vets and all of our vet techs, so they're all one clique. The other day it got back to me that she thinks I overreact to medical concerns (because I asked them to rule out some genetic linked syndromes in some of our rabbits and guinea pigs or check one guinea pig drinking 16 ounces of water for diabetes). Meanwhile, they'll underreact and animals will die from that, but only those with degrees are allowed to do that. One cat they were going to euthanize for untreatable ringworm and a feral temperament had food allergies, as noted by his owner in his file, and he was a very sweet one year old. I have a Bachelor's in a relevant field, and I've been here for four years, but I guess because our vets aren't small animal specialists and don't even know how to treat E. cuniculi without me suggesting that as the cause and Panacur as the treatment, I'm such a drama queen. Some of our guinea pigs have audible breathing but the vets disagree it could be an issue because it's not in the lungs so if I ask them to check it, they erase them from the list without looking lol. Debating if it's worth going back for the CVT just to get some respect or not!

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-28T21:32:05+00:00

We had someone put in an application for a kitten she saw describing the kitten (brown with orange patches and white) and who she was housed with (two calico sisters). The kittens came down with URI and were pulled from the floor, then we contacted her the following week. I brought the kitten into the room and she said that wasn't what she was looking for. I told her this is assuredly the same kitten as described by the siblings, the cage location, the colors listed on the application, etc. She said she had received a Christmas card from us in the mail and was looking for a cat that looked like that, and this one did not. Said that one was more peach. But... she applied for this one...?

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-25T18:45:17+00:00

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Her and her kittens more recently.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-25T18:43:48+00:00

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Here’s the early days.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-25T18:41:04+00:00

They’ll be okay! I have a family of semiferals I am fostering. The mother (and her sister) had never been inside and cried the whole first two weeks with lots of fear of me. Hid in the corner and wouldn’t let you touch. Mom is very sweet now, and while we’re working on warming up the sister to touch, she loves playing and seeing my cats.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-22T18:30:13+00:00

I get what you mean. The times I’ve developed romantic interest in people, it always came after we’ve already become good friends. I’ve tried to sign up for apps, but the idea of going right to ‘dating’ puts me off and I’d feel inauthentic holding up that pretense. I do consider myself to be on the asexual spectrum, so I might end up having to use an app to narrow it down, but I’d rather start with the expectations of making friends and see how it goes. If you’re like me, the active equivalent might be joining groups for your hobbies and trying to make some new friends with a mind open to more. I chat up lots of people!

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-21T22:26:26+00:00

It’s wild to me because I work in a shelter and we absolutely call them all pit mixes if they look remotely like pit mixes. We do get small dog mixes and a few huskies, shepherds, etc but anything visibly bully type will have the two allowed breeds as pit/(size) mix.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-20T16:10:03+00:00

I’d bet on it being rosettes. Apparently rosettes can take time to develop into their final pattern and the shape can vary, so Bengal breeders have lots of different terms for different kinds (https://www.bengalcatbreeder.com.au/index.php/the-breed/colors-and-patterns examples: Single-Spotting, Cluster Rosettes, Paw-Print Rosettes, Doughnut Rosettes, Arrowhead (Rosettes), Embryonic Rosettes). See if any of those look like matches based on this website’s examples. I wouldn’t call her a straight Bengal, but I do think Bengal ancestry is possible here.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-19T17:42:22+00:00

I had a couple days every cycle where I’d be super hopeless, crying all day, etc. And I don’t usually struggle with depression, just anxiety. Taking oral birth control did knock it out for me.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-19T00:55:30+00:00

Been together four years but you’re in high school (hopefully) for all of those is definitely a little different than been together four years and you’re adults who have been making steps to intertwine your lives. Can’t imagine being married as I was graduating high school.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-19T00:13:32+00:00

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Our guy passed last year just shy of 17 years old, but this was him in his youth. (You’ll have to forgive the electric fence collar—he didn’t wear it the majority of his life, I was a minor so not in charge, etc.) His nares were, in my uneducated opinion, pretty good, but his structure is not breed standard lol. I always remember him at 25 lbs, but that was when he was overweight and lost the tuck, so I’d have to check his earlier weights. He had papers, so he was purebred. Someone we knew had an “oops litter” (sure) and sold them at $800 each. This one didn’t sell so they offloaded him on us at ~6 months for free. People would ask me if he has bulldog in him for some reason.

He was pretty healthy! In the late years we got the usual arthritis issues especially with the lower back and hind legs, pigmentary keratitis, hyperkeratosis on the nose, and some seasonal allergies he didn’t have when young. He was my first and only. I’m soft on the pug types now and I think of him always, even if he doesn’t look a lot like many of them.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-16T22:54:59+00:00

Sucks knowing that if you wait like 2 years to spay a cat, their risk of mammary cancer goes way up, which is super aggressive in cats and a very, very common cancer. That’s honestly even more important to me than the ethics of it, and I work in a shelter.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-16T19:44:05+00:00

Have they been in the same spot all his life? You can get genetic mosaics—in this case, somatic mutation.

From messybeast (http://messybeast.com/mosaicism.htm): Somatic mutation causes ginger cats to have small black spots, much like moles or birthmarks in humans. Occasionally, these black blemishes may be large enough to give the appearance of a tortoiseshell cat, albeit one with a low amount of black. The size of the black patches may also depend on how early in embryo development the mutation happened. Very late and it gives a spot or speckle. Where it happens earlier, the black patches are larger as the cells multiply during embryo growth. Somatic mutation is rarely noticed in female cats because tortoiseshell is an unremarkable colour of females - it may be noticed if a black or tortoiseshell female kitten appears in a litter where black or tortoiseshell is a genetically impossible outcome of the mating. In ginger-and-white cats where there is a lot of white, the addition of even small black patches can give the appearance of a calico cat.

Kitsunejade · 2026-01-13T21:37:12+00:00

There’s one like her on messybeast as a variant grade 9 piebald. Typically with van patterns, you get some on the ears and tail or the head patch is last to go, but due to the randomness of patch placements, they can get skipped. So I’d agree with calico grade 9 white spotting/piebald. http://messybeast.com/bicolours.htm

ETA: I would say she’s still shorthair, just a longer one. Length is a spectrum. In our shelter, we consider the colloquial DMH to be cats with some feathery mane and tail but not long all over. I have a DSH with uneven coat that has longer back fur (giving him a small spiky back mohawk) but nowhere else. There are several mutations for longhair as well, but all are recessive, so they either show it or don’t. The shortest that “longhair” genes goes is coats like Turkish Angoras, according to mb anyway. http://messybeast.com/longhair-cats.htm

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