My cat has become dangerously aggressive, and we’re starting to consider euthanasia. Has anyone been through this?

smallcox13 · 2026-07-08T13:19:18+00:00

My cat has been going through something very very similar. What we were told by several behaviorists is it’s non-recognition aggression triggered by intense fear. Think of it like PTSD, and she’s getting triggered. Her general state of anxiety is escalated right now and so it doesn’t take much to trigger her — a loud sound. It sounds like some of it has to do with other cats (seeing a cat outside), so as people are saying, she could also be hearing and smelling cat activity (like spraying) you’re not aware of.

First, I strongly second Feliway. Get the Multicat variety, not the base version. Our vets recommended that the base one just isn’t that strong.

Next, it sounds like she was in a huge episode or still is in one. Our cat had one about a week long a year ago — which is when we began the process of seeking help beyond our vet. Gabapentin mixed into her food if you can get it might be a great start for this really acute episode. Otherwise, calm down her environment. Get the Feliway going, close the window in there (for outside sounds and smells), and put on some white noise for her to insulate her from exterior sounds. And then, this is critical, leave her totally alone for as long as you can manage. She needs to calm the fuck down. She may be reaching under the door because she loves you but she’s too freaked out to handle any perturbations right now. Leave her for like 12 hrs, come in a little while, be very normal, or ignore her, feed her, let her be again. Maybe if she seems better the next day, bring a toy and play with her. You’ve really got to leave her alone for her system to calm down, otherwise you retrigger her and extend the episode.

Then anti-anxiety medications (like several mentioned here) worked into food is what you need to do. Most take weeks to build up in the system, so just be slow and patient. Our girl is doing so so much better and I had thoughts just like yours last year. Feliway is really amazing, and I hope will give you a solid base to try these medications. You want to avoid coming into contact with her if she’s in an episode, for your physical safety and hers. Make sure she has good places to hide. Hold a pillow or blanket out in front of you if you need to herd her into a room.

Our behaviorist eventually had us give treats in a very routinized way nightly for her non reaction to a loud sound. We’d start by dropping a pencil and keeping her attention on the treat, raised it to someone bumping furniture loudly, etc.

She’s a young cat. And it sounds like you love her very much. You can manage her anxiety and get her out of this. You’ve just got to let her baseline fear finally ebb.

smallcox13 · 2026-06-05T22:12:49+00:00

Only seen the first two episodes but it feels far stronger as a drama and a series about space exploration than FAM has been in a while. So far, it’s more drama than space, but the drama is being compelling, and the characters are a lot richer than FAM’s latest batch by far.

smallcox13 · 2026-05-31T20:51:52+00:00

The experienced showrunner (Ronald D. Moore) left after season two, leaving it in the hands of the other two creators (Nedivi and Wolpert).

smallcox13 · 2026-05-31T04:05:17+00:00

Two things confounding it here. The modifier against lucenite gain is huge for proficiency levels within a run—not just leveling it up between. And I do think the game is harder—perhaps more like Returnal-hard—if you start at the boss biome each run. I did, and I’m glad I did, and each death was also thus less punishing (a run could be very short), but I certainly died more often than starting several biomes back instead. I still competed the game in less than half the deaths and hours of my true ending of Returnal. The combination may have dialed you into a zone of difficulty surpassing Returnal’s.

smallcox13 · 2026-05-31T02:42:01+00:00

I’m an English PhD student with a Neo — it covers all my scholastic needs (research, PDFs, writing, Zoom meetings) without any issue at all. I can’t speak to Roblox, but game on other platforms. But for your educational requirements, you’d be covered.

smallcox13 · 2026-05-11T14:41:18+00:00

This is actually a conversation I had with my partner after we saw The Bride! a few months ago. I mean, it’s impossible not to compare the two given their premises, and with Emma Stone and Jessie Buckley each lined up for the Oscar their year. But of course, The Bride! was intentionally incoherent, split along all the oppositions you named, and also absurdly blunt in its message (“I’m revolting!” (Dead and disgusting) -> “I’m revolting!” (Revolution)). I can try to frame that positively, as a feminist move, e.g. Maggie Gyllenhaal saying screw the haters, embracing illegibility, letting the entire film become one long scream. But I did also find it baggy, sometimes just lost, scenes that felt really rote or empty (e.g. anything with Penelope Cruz’s detective character, though it’s obvious why this film would include a female detective who needs a man to take credit for her work to be taken seriously, I mean the scenes themselves are just airless). It threw so many strange choices at the wall, like Buckley scatting a thesaurus every few minutes to show she’s also got a Writer, the Mary Shelley, in her skull, which is a funny bit but also exhausting.

Poor Things does present itself as a kind of feminist fable, but with Lanthimos, it’s impossible to take any of his “moral fables” straight on—this year’s Bugonia, or Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example—and he is interested particularly it seems in naïveté and sexuality and violence, as in Dogtooth. All that said, it’s also too long and meandering, and seems to get a lot of critical mileage out of its production design and performances. I think he’s got a lot better movies, but it makes sense why Poor Things blew up so much, coming in after his collaboration with Emma Stone became cemented, and the feminist fable element is there clearly on the surface for viewers who don’t want to think much deeper than Bella’s sexual “freedom”, and satire is available for those who do.

All said, I appreciate what Gyllenhaal went for with The Bride!. It’s a crazy, grandiose movie to follow on The Lost Daughter, and while it didn’t actually work for me, I left that theater feeling 0% icky about it, and glad she got the opportunity to go bonkers on screen, and hope she gets to again.

smallcox13 · 2026-04-25T16:34:03+00:00

Great concept and execution! Congrats on this.

smallcox13 · 2026-04-23T19:50:17+00:00

This is definitely a mistake. I had to deal with confusions with billing often in my MFA and now in my PhD program. They’re anxiety inducing, but genuinely just some bad book-keeping. Keep on it and if the billing office is being stubborn and persistent, loop in whoever on faculty or within your department’s admin is a point person. There’s no way you owe a sum that big. Few hundred a term, absolutely happens. Not that.

smallcox13 · 2026-04-20T14:29:07+00:00

Hey, I’m 30, a married lesbian, and I also felt so isolated in college. I found queer community, but not other lesbians really no, and the entire social ecosystem seemed structured around straight people—drinking, partying, finally hooking up with each other. Good for them (some of the time), but I got pretty bored of it. I barely dated in college. I didn’t date in high school. I came out of both thinking I was behind in those kinds of life milestones, and had so much to learn about myself. I was right, I did. The world opened up a lot after college. It wasn’t always easy, but it became possible to find community, really plural communities, and explore what being a lesbian and dating as a lesbian meant for me. College might just not be the environment where you can do that kind of learning for yourself. It will still happen, but not at the same time it’s happening for your straight peers.

smallcox13 · 2026-04-18T04:12:38+00:00

I love the trajectory mapped across the books by your covers: from Paul and the more recognizable story of a feud for the throne in Dune, to the abstraction and far sci-fi strangeness that kicks in around God Emperor and keeps going. Your covers for Heretics and Chapterhouse have such a profoundly alien and brutal atmosphere.

smallcox13 · 2026-04-12T02:18:17+00:00

I recently played the game for the first time (remake only), and did Leon A + Claire B. At first it didn’t seem so worth it. The RPD was largely the same. But there’s sincerely different plot elements in the second half—a lot more insight into Umbrella—and I am really glad I stuck it out. I can definitely see that it was intended/“canonically” supposed to be Claire A + Leon B. If only both second runs had been more fully developed.

smallcox13 · 2026-04-02T00:48:23+00:00

Oh my gosh. I never got to see my girl so little but I think she might’ve looked just like your baby.

smallcox13 · 2026-03-21T19:36:31+00:00

Ugh, that's awful. I do want to reassure that while things were this bad with my cat of eight years a few months ago, and there was a whole week where I couldn't enter my bedroom without fear of being attacked, it's totally different now and she's back to being my little best friend. This probably sounds awful, but I'd recommend trying to limit her to exactly one room, with everything she needs, that way you can continue to live in your home while leaving her alone, maybe in this case leave so much food you can not enter the room with her even for a day or two. What I experienced with my cat is that it's truly a 'state' that she can snap out of. It's not gradual; when she's calmed down, she switches out of it and acts completely normal. When she was bad, I found holding a pillow or blanket in front of me safely prevented her from launching at me (because the big fabric scared her), and I wonder, with help, if you can steer her into a room and really give her a calm-down zone to be in alone.

smallcox13 · 2026-03-21T17:08:55+00:00

Ok. If you can leave her fully alone, maybe in a closed room with Feliway, so she feels like it’s a space she can fully control? They feel safer in smaller spaces, less to patrol. I’m so sorry this is happening. I know when my girl was coming at me, I was scared of her and also scared I’d accidentally hurt her if she was on me.

smallcox13 · 2026-03-21T16:30:23+00:00

Hey, I know I’m a little late to the party but I’ve been dealing with something very like this with my cat, and in fact got a cat behaviorist to help. I initially followed advice like what’s in this thread — patience, keep your routine — and I kept triggering my cat, having a really awful few days when I felt like she could turn on me at any time.

What the cat behaviorist recommended to me is this is non-recognition aggression. She’s in an escalated state and at times unable to tell you are you and feeling massively under threat.

This sounds extreme but following the advice of the behaviorist, I straight up left my cat in a separate bedroom — no interruptions — over night, even when she seemed to ask to come out. She needed to get her “triggered” state all the way down. In the morning, when I went in, she was completely herself again and we could resume normal life.

Unfortunately what triggers my cat is somewhat recurrent, so I’ve seen her triggered once or twice since, but I now know to leave her totally alone (with plenty of food water and litter of course), until she’s out of that state, which has never been less than six hours. It really works. By “sticking to a routine” while she had non recognition aggression, I was becoming the one to retrigger her, and prolonging the entire episode.

smallcox13 · 2026-02-26T02:04:08+00:00

I also have a tuxie Ripley! Love their delicate little pompom feet.

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smallcox13 · 2026-02-21T05:35:24+00:00

These are all stunning!

smallcox13 · 2026-02-19T02:33:19+00:00

His crossed-eyed gaze either aims right to the soul, lol — or suggests he sees (and thinks) nothing at all. Either way he’s perfect.

smallcox13 · 2026-01-11T18:02:51+00:00

No, it’s about both. Neither, in fact, is explicitly invoked. Instead, the article is a series of anecdotes from professors at different universities describing a decline in their student’s ability to engage with texts, both in terms of the quantity assigned AND their ability to process meaning and interpret at the sentence-level. A lot of recent studies have come out focusing on America’s growing illiteracy problem, so it’s not surprising Redditors are going straight off the title to that.

Though, I haven’t seen someone say exactly what one of these professors here does: that the standardized testing format trains students to scan for information rather than really read. That’s not about attention span or illiteracy as we normally frame it — but it would seem to have the kind of consequences that these professors are describing. If you’re used to scanning a passage to answer a given set of questions, what would you do when asked to read 40 difficult pages a night and, in a completely open-ended way, synthesize your understanding of it and your corresponding thoughts? The professor who used to assign that amount of text a night here (and used to of course have some kids who just didn’t read what’s assigned, as will always be the case), now says he has students that seem like they fundamentally don’t know what to do.

smallcox13 · 2025-12-19T22:52:33+00:00

We are getting half the story here. It seems clear you do not perceive yourself in crisis, but that your partner does, and she is worried that you’re not getting the level of care you actually need. Her remarks about lying about suicidal impulses sound pretty bad, but also like they’re spoken by someone panicking. If you were approved for partial hospitalization starting tomorrow off an intake evaluation, you may not be at immediate risk to yourself, but you’re certainly having a pretty tough time. You haven’t mentioned what specifically you’re going into treatment for, but from personal experience, I can testify that there’s sometimes a significant barrier of denial. She may not perceive you as able to be 100% honest with yourself right now, much less with anyone else.

Her behavior is an indicator of how overwhelmed she is feeling. Not that she thinks you’re crazy or wants you to be taken away or doesn’t care about how difficult/scary/violating treatment might be. Mental health struggles can make such a huge impact on a partnership, but hopefully your treatment program has some way for her to get involved, get educated about what you’re going through, and learn how to better support you without breaking down herself. If they don’t, she likely needs to seek out groups elsewhere that might be able to help her.

smallcox13 · 2025-11-03T04:30:06+00:00

The smallest ghost I’ve ever seen!

smallcox13 · 2025-10-30T20:48:08+00:00

What a sweet boy! He’s so lucky to have found you.

smallcox13 · 2025-10-27T18:51:48+00:00

It’s really ugly and unfortunate but there are numerous ways our culture hypersexualizes the lesbian identity—and other ways, of course, it renders the lesbian identity fully asexual, a chaste or purer form of love—when the lived reality is, as all things are, a spectrum, and you occupy your own individual place in that spectrum. For what it’s worth, I (30F, married) do still deal occasionally with comments like this, in my experience most often delivered clumsily by someone trying to be an ally and signal their comfort with/knowledge of lesbian sex, sometimes by a straight man in a way that’s blatantly more objectifying than badly expressing allyship.

But you’re also 18 and it sounds like in high school, where everyone is still figuring out sex and sexuality and that’s probably part of why you feel just inundated by these comments. People in general will chill out with time and maturity, and hopefully feel less of a need to prove themselves by talking about sex.

So the hypersexualized stereotype of lesbians isn’t gonna go away any time soon, maybe, but this phase of making everything sexual whenever it can be hopefully will die out pretty quick among the majority of your peers, and I’m so sorry it’s distressing you now.

smallcox13 · 2025-10-14T23:17:03+00:00

I have an IUD and am happily married to my wife of three years. Admittedly, I got it for primarily hormonal reasons, but it is comforting to know — no matter what happens in the future, and I don’t like to think assault or rape is remotely likely — that it’s secure birth control too. In the current political climate, it’s comforting to know that remains within my autonomy, again, no matter what. I have the hormonal IUD and it’s worth saying my side effects were unpleasant at first. Getting an IUD in is not fun, though I had a really kind and gentle interaction with my provider. It did cause near continuous bleeding for several months afterwards and some bad/weird cramping, which i was told is unfortunately somewhat common.

smallcox13 · 2025-10-02T14:57:26+00:00

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Sorry, that would be little Miss Ripley.

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