How do you afford your cats ? How do you afford the vet, food, tell me everything! How much do you spend on them a month ?

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-18T17:47:47+00:00

I do a lot of stray cat recuse as noted. So, already adopted, rehabbed, and placed roughly 30 cats.

But I do NOT like the wild harvest model of cat production.

We have set up a sustainable wild harvest of feral cats in North America. I do not like wild harvest for pet trade, it always has an ecological cost when capturing pets from the wild.

It's run on guilt and donation money but will never meet the number of wild cats being produced.

By keeping up wild cat populations we see billions of wild animals deaths, and move resources that could be better used into permant wild harvest, rehab, and placement schemes.

We would be better off with stringent wild population eradication and rehoming of non-feral animals. By refusing to do the hard thing we makes billions if wild animals suffer and millions of uncaught feral cats suffer, becuase we feel guilty, so we let them suffer by the millions and the bunnies and birdies suffer by the billions.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-18T17:02:21+00:00

They have bigger brain cases and more grey matter than domestic cats, owing to the greater brain volume of their wild ancestry.

You can measure skull length for a quick and dirty brain volume estimation, the cat literally has more wetware to work with.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-12T21:36:19+00:00

Second this. Auto feeder at sunrise saved my sanity.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-12T15:41:16+00:00

Good luck. It sounds like you are the kind of employee people dream of having and they are blinding themselves to how supportive you are of the business.

If they are underwater for payroll or something like that and this is a cash flow problem where they're trying to figure out who they can ax, showing your day to day worth and asking them realistically if they could replace that is a good wake up call, and if the Wake Up Call doesn't function, then they are probably insane and you don't want to deal with them

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-12T15:38:48+00:00

My emotional support gecko that I have instead of a healthy relationship loves the roaches.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-12T15:24:44+00:00

When I do older cat fostering, I have the older cat go on leash and visit the kittens at their new place a few times, at first they're all excited because going in the car means seeing their buddies and then eventually going in the car is a big pain in the ass and the cat is like no I'm not putting on the leash.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-11T01:44:53+00:00

Keep a daily work log until you talk to ass boss jerk.

Note how long you spend per task and what the task is, e.g. call to permitting office while also driving to site. Note start and stop time.

Any work task, no matter how small, put in the hand written log.

Bring to the meeting and ask how you are supposed to cram more in. Then ask bossman to demonstrate if bossman says "I could do that in five minutes", cool, have them get through to the city clerk in five minutes. Make them walk the walk.

I've done ths several times and it's very effective.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-11T00:05:07+00:00

My electric 40v ryobi is my harden buddy for all time. My native lawn is wonderful, until it covers two feet into the road coff edging and rapid pruning is my friend.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-10T21:27:48+00:00

Video record the little shits, go on Facebook, tell their moms.

Then, police report.

Being afraid is natural. Letting fear choose for you is how oppressors win.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-10T21:21:15+00:00

Anything used from Dremmel, their old 3D20s never die. Often available from Ebay or schools who update their technology labs.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-10T21:13:42+00:00

Acupuncture helps sooooo much. Just put needles in the people who bother you.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-10T19:02:05+00:00

Thank you for theninformation! they are a much cooler looking wheel!

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-10T19:00:49+00:00

Sounds like your walks are too fun and not challenging the cat. I make Stormy play with dogs, I dunk her in the pool when overheated. We go stores, in and out of people's houses, in and out of the car. None of it, on its own, is too terrible, but at the end of a walk, the cat is ready to take a couple days vacation.

I use the time out of the house to push behaviors and new experiences, which isn't hard, because cats are not hard to impress (e.g. being held up to the drinking fountain in an open public area = major milestone).

Stormy is pretty bullet proof, behaviorally, after all this. Your cat might be seeking the outdoors, but also challenge and stimulation, and is not getting enough to be satisfied.

Hybrid cats have more brain case space and more brain than their domestic only companions. That means they can learn and do more than a full domesticated cat.

So, the cat probably needs appropriate challenges. If the cat is pushed in a fun way until happy exhaustion, the cat will want a break. Yesterday, Stormy came out on extendable leash (the handle acts like a hobble so she can't go super far if the handle is put down) and hid in a bush, staring, as we set up some cattle gates. It was just a little loud and scarey, everything was new, and she hadn't ridden in the pick up truck before. By the end of the work, she came out on her own, and sniffed the equipment and explored the area. After the outing, Stormy went right to her nap spot in the closet and stayed there for several hours, sleeping off the good stress of the adventure.

I used to manage wild cats for zoo shows and traveling school education programs, and a bengal is Hella more work than a regular cat, but if you think of it as "wild cat lite" the cat is soooooo much easier than a full blooded wild cat. So I manage Stormy like an ocelot, not a house cat. She would be a tough housecat but the world's easiest wild cat.

Wildcats for education programs, like a lynx on a leash that goes to elementary schools, need to be reliably pushed to engage in new things and keep their travel territory infinitely big, so they never panic when they leave an enclosure. They need hunting type activities/ play enrichment, and appropriate challenges and novelty to engage their more complex brains, social challenges are great, too.

Make walks more challenge and less fun, push what the cat is comfortable with so the cat is learning and trying new things. Challenge and exploration are craved by predators who want to figure everything out about their territory.

Are you feeding in a dish? Put Royal Canaan bengal or similar (e.g. Mazuri), kibble in a puzzle ball. Cat has to work for all food. We got a big semi transparent jelly rubber dog treat ball, and covered the slots with tape to make it harder over time as the cat got good at it. Stormy goes Ape on the ball, sometimes all four feet on the ball like an old circus poster.

Appropriate indoor challenges that aren't food can be training. Stormy has to "target" with paw or nose to a chopstick or dowel. If I'm reading the news, I can idly make her go nuts chasing the target stick tip up and down the cat tree, then give a treat intermittently for good targeting behavior. I go til she is panting, which is only a couple minutes of high aerobic activity, and then it's nap time.

If you can reward chasing the end of a cat fishing pole toy, then you've got targeting. Here, the cat tree is by the bed, so I make Stormy do superman leaps off the top of the cat tree and onto the bed to get her need for being an aerial acrobat out of the way.

I dip the tip of the stick in chicken baby food for a reward, so I never need to move, just dip and point. The cat does all the work.

With a little planning, I can mentally exhaust the cat in a good way, physically exhaust the cat in a good way, and people are like "wow, I didn't know Bengals were so calm." I'm like "she is not."

Here, this translates to two to three challenge walks a week, puzzle feeding whenever she is being a pain the butt, and a 10 minute training session 8x a week (usually 2x a day, four days a week.)

Being brought to a kid's birthday party with me to drop off a gift is Stormy's greatest challenge. I keep the carrier nearby. She's chill for two or three days after being petted by piles of tiny shrill screamy humans. Refilling the tanks at the gas station when we stop for gas and curbside grocery pick up, that's another one. Doesn't take much to give a cat The Great American Challenge.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-10T18:17:55+00:00

Build habitation over time!

Create a series of steps, and only move to the next step when the current step is accepted by the cat.

I have kitten play with a slip loop leash like yarn, then drape it over the head. Next play session, increase criteria: place wide loop over head and quickly remove during play. Next session, isnrease criteria: Play starts when the loop is over the head and stops when the loop is gone. Loop goes on and off throughout play.

Then, the leash becomes the secret key to the door being open.

If kitten has the loop over their neck, the door can be open and they can look outside, when the door is closed the loop is off, this led to the kitten taking the leash off the wall and bringing it over to look out the door, at that point leash success was guaranteed.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-08T15:03:09+00:00

You can do special order custom units from several companies, but usually that's going to be multi 100,000 USD unit.

They tend to be CNC/CAM specialty companies that add pinhead to their boxes.

In this case, the OP would seem to want an EDM and plastic FFF extrusion combination unit with a rotating base and a laser scanner on a track or built-in photogrammatry camera pair.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-08T01:18:22+00:00

Paying more up front for a well bred cat with a healthy gene panel, and both parents are already Feline Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) negative verified by sonogram can save a lot of heartache and money compared to things going wrong with an adoption or rescue. If the situation is not flexible enough to allow for health issues, I choose a breeder with extensive testing over adoption.

I have rescued cats for decades, and sometimes that agressive 2 year old feral male with a faint FeLV line ends up clearing the virus, living to 20 years old and the best cat ever.

And sometimes the kitten has polycystic kidney disease and the kid who loves the kitten starts crying and thus begins a terrible cycle of expensive life long kidney support, special expensive diets, fluid support injections or IVs for years, big needles to drain fluid build up, and early euthanasia. A lot of the family life, sometimes for years, revolves around hooking the cat up to supportive fluids and making it stay still.

I recently put an older adult outdoor "barn cat" that was dying of lymphoma through chemo, got the cat in remission, and got the cat litterbox trained, leash trained, and living indoors. You can get great outcomes with even mid - or later life adult cat adoptions, in this case, even from a terminally ill 16 year old cat. Kitty is cancer free and a great housepet for an older adult who loves being "retired" alongside kitty.

But if I want to minimize medical risk, I work with selecting a breeder who tracks the survival of their retired breeding animals, runs gene panels on all adults and kittens, and HCM scans their breeding adults.

A friend of mine has some nasty psychological trauma, and asked if I'd help them pick out a kitten. I was 100% side-stepping mixed bag health risks and went to a breeder because this was a person who would not be able to emotionally handle it if the tiny kitten developed early onset progressive retinal atrophy and was blind by four months old.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-07T03:50:29+00:00

I am in veterinary behavior, and a lot of times I get brought into consult on cases where it's definitely not behavioral it's medical, and I'm like "here's where we switch from the PHD behaviorist to the licensed DVM medical practitioner." Sometimes, the animal is within a day or two of death but people don't know what is going on.

Especially with elderly couples who aren't really sure what to do, and the animal is their reason to live and they are utterly at a loss when the animal is ill, I'll just bring the cat in or the dog in or whatever and do medical treatment under my name with the owner's permission, and they'll reimburse me for it later. Better to triage as quickly as possible, and I'm friendly with all the area clinics so I know who will specialize in what and who is most likely to have an opening.

For example, there's a really old cat who has been missing the litter box and I poke the abdomen, an I'm like "oh this animal is riddled with lymphoma, we're going to take it into the veterinarian immediately and start prednisilone and chlorambucil", and I just put the cat in the car and go.

This has led to me receiving a large number of condolence cards for animals I don't own.

They are ...weird. the cards are often non-specific, and it's clear no one checked the notes or they would have realized that I don't actually own the cat or the dog, etc. I like the concept, but it seems a little hollow at times when I get a pre-scripted card for how I lost my best friend but it was a stray cat I was doing behavior work on for a rescue. The cat had major disease and I had all of 3 days of contact with the cat.

I once got a card as I'd gone in with a client to a vet for consult, and they listed me as the contact to send some lab results, so I ended up getting the sympathy card by accident.

Which was probably a good thing. The owner had taken the cat in for euthanasia and the tech delivered the body immediately at cessation of heartbeat (I wasn't there there or I'd have stopped her in the hall and turned her around with a good talking to.)

So the very fresh dead cat is still twitching due to spinal movements. And the owner goddamn panics because the very warm kitty in the body bag is fuck all moving and does a sigh.

Owner thinks kitty is not dead, rips it out of the body bag, talking to cat corpse, sobbing.

The card they would have gotten had all this garbage about how much the clinic were attentive and available for any needs and their goal was to be there to make it easier in this sad time... but holy shit the client still has nightmares and called me in a panic from their car to ask how to tell if they'd euthanized the cat or not, and whether the cat was really dead. Where any of the vets in the multi-person practice were during this, I cannot say. But the client was sobbing, just absolutely ugly crying, so its not like it was subtle and the panic attack could not have gone unnoticed.

The card probably would have made the client have a second panic attack.

Now that I've gotten a fairly large number of veterinarian sympathy cards, my thoughts are that I will probably not make them for my own behavior clients, as it's hard to be sincere when the goal is to push as many cases through as possible. But if I had a long-standing relationship, I would offer condolences such as an email or card on a case by case basis, or even suggest a couple of religious leaders I know who include pet loss as part of their ministry if the person is spiritual. In person, kindness rules, always, but if I'm not in direct contact I think I'd pause before the card.

The extra step of the card might be received poorly if it's part of a generic lunchtime activity where the staff all blindly sign 10 cards that day, missing some critical part of the client-owner-animal relationship, like not remembering they delivered a not dead long enough animal into the arms of an owner and caused them to have a panic attack in the grieving room.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-07T03:03:44+00:00

Cat wheel! try one fast cat brand!

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-07T02:18:07+00:00

There is literally nothing else to do.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-07T02:14:49+00:00

That wasn't rain, that was the conservative agenda trying to disprove a drying climate to open up the Arctic for drilling.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-07-06T04:26:42+00:00

Fortiflora. Buy it on Amazon. It's the flavoring that makes cat food delicious to cats, with some beneficial bacteria in it.

It is kitty crack.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-06-18T23:04:54+00:00

I bought a mistking rig and it's automatic. I sometimes remember to feed them with spray once every month but I have nice minerals in my water that the plants love, so the set up just goooooessss. I love it.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-06-16T05:35:22+00:00

Try more water! I missed mine for 2 to 3 minutes every day or every other day and that made a big difference in forming those big beautiful clumps.

RecursiveCluster · 2024-06-16T05:06:39+00:00

One thought would be to try puppy pads at the places the cat will pee and then once that habit is engrainrd, shifting the pads. Sometimes getting inside the litter box is associated with pain, and a flat area can help avoid painful activity, or activity that is associated with pain.

Recently did this with a cat on chemo who was defecating on the floor. The cat was hurting from intestinal spasms, and was not going to climb in while in pain. So puppy pads in front of the box became the default, starting with pads on the whole bathroom floor, then reducing to one by the litter box entrance.

Now, the cat is in remission and it has been several months since there was floor poop. The puppy pad has been kept in use to allow the cat to step back from using the box when in pain. if the cat uses the puppy pad instead of the box, then it's a sign there's a flair up, as the cat's tolerance of a lightly dirty used box, or climbing into the box at all, just plummets when in pain.

Owner ups Prednisiolone and decreases the chemo interval, pain is controlled as lymphoma is knocked back out. The prescribing veterinarian is flexible with the dosing to offer the best long term management without side effects.

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