Requesting Funny Pet Stories

o-o I want to hear ALL THE THINGS your weird animals do! ALL OF THEM.

 

here's a few Classic Tales abt my mom's two old cats Sasha and Max, which are all second hand anecdotes since she had to give them up in ~198something

in like, the 70s? 80s? she was working in a facility which, technically, wasn't supposed to have cats in it. I'm not clear on how she got them, but i think a coworker was like "i have kittens, want kittens?" and she was like "g i v e k i t t e n s O_O"

anyway they ended up spending the work day in a box under her desk so her boss wouldn't notice these Verboten Kittens. when she took them home, she figured they'd need to use the litter box, since they'd been in a cardboard box all day.

so she put them in it all "okay here you are, do your business" and they just immediately climbed out again.

hm. surely they knew how to use the litter box, right? and she didn't want them peeing on the floor or her stuff, so she put them back in the litter box, they get out, this repeated a couple more times until they just curled up and tried to sleep. in the litter box.

she says they must have thought, "well we've been in that box all day, now she wants us in this box? the poop box?? ....okay yeah sure [snooze]"

these two weird catbros grew up to be "16-pound trucker cats" who would climb on top of her turntable to get onto the bookshelves as soon as she'd left for work, which she found out one time when she realized she'd left her lunch or something at home, turned around, and found Max and Sasha doing their best "who, me?? climbing on your record player? lies and slander!!" faces. while standing on the record player.

also they traumatized her cactus, because they did the classic attack-the-houseplant manoeuvre and were outraged that it fought back, so they somehow figured out that they could knock it over and push the pot, which of course didn't have spikes. they somehow got it out of its soil and were preparing to knock it off the balcony when she rescued the poor cactus, but they got their revenge in that it never flowered again.

edit: oh also my dad's ole cat Emile

Spoiler: this post is too long lol

so, emile was a small lil cat who only briefly met Max and Sasha, and was apparently spooked by them, because i think being faced with two huge brothers, probably on their home turf, is kind of intimidating?

but anyway emile and my dad lived in the same building as my dad's at-some-point-girlfriend Abby, and her cat's name was Ketzele. sometimes dad would visit her apartment and bring Emile along to have like, cat play-dates with Ketzele (aww). one time, they were nyooming around the place having a good time, when emile ran out onto the balcony and, uh, fell off? and broke one of his front legs by landing with all his weight on it or something.
so, emile gets a lil cast on his leg, and the next time dad takes him over to Abby's place, ketzele basically goes "haha dude you look so dumb" or something to that effect, and emile knows he looks like a goof with his leg in a cast, so he takes a swipe at ketzele and is suuuuper smug to discover that now his dumb broken leg lets him thwap the other cat in the snoot to establish dominance.

 

there are blankets covering our living room couches (completely covering, tucked in and everything). when i'm having my coffee on the big couch, steve sometimes ends up on my lap, or on the back of the couch behind my head. he likes to be nearby. other times, though, he aggressively wiggles his way underneath the tucked-in edge of the blanket, then navy-seal crawls until he bumps into my leg. then he'll meow plaintively for a minute or so. just a big meowing lump under the blanket. he'll stay there for hours, occasionally meowing if you poke him.

he also likes to dig his nails into the fabric of my boxspring and drag himself along the wood floor, much like small children (and immature adults, such as myself) slide on floors in their socks. he reaches great speeds.

what else does steve do..... hmm. he gets into fights with water bottles, he's engaged in a cold war with my curtains, he's having a love affair with my bathrobe, he gets into the fridge if you turn your back on it when the door's open, he sometimes gets into cupboards then meows like he's been imprisoned, he'll have conversations with you if you meow back in the same tone, he always sounds like he's in deep distress and his meows always sound like questions (miiiaow?? maow? maaaaow?? miaaaaaaaow?)

his tail is curly and he's trying to make friends with the cat next door, who comes over onto my balcony specifically for the purpose of hissing at steve.

 

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee this is perf

 

*sighs* Okay, so, 2 years ago my best friend and I got a mongrel from the local shelter at 2 months old. They told us the dogs were shipped from down Compton. As in California. They were supposedly puppies being bred to fight and because my friend and I are 1.) plain dumb 2.) too excited 3.) new to being pet owners or 4.) all the above we thought, "oh, hey, that one there has brindle markings with German Sheppard coloring! Cute!"

Yeah, what we thought would be a medium-sized guard dog turned out to be 75lbs lapdog. All six feet, from tip of nose to tip of a very loooong tail, of not very bright dog. She looks like a short haired German Sheppard with grey hound legs and a pitbull face. I was kind of shocked. Also, the dumbest thing on four legs. I cannot emphasize this enough. She ate a solid wood stool in five hours. It was the same size as her. She had to be on a semi-liquid diet for a month after that.

She also jumped out of the car window while we were going 35mph. Rollicked around a 4 way intersection and causing quite a ruckus, and I was going to kill that dog, holy smoking hell. Then she tried to eat her tail. It severely pissed her off one afternoon and she managed to break the bones in it somehow, at the base of her butt.

She never barks, when she panics she'd ran into the wall next to a wide open door trying to get away from, at one time, an (admittingly huge) fly, and at other times...I have no idea. She's easily spooked by her own shadow. She's tried to run through the glass doors several time, looking really offended when she bounces off. (The cats do the same, actually.) She wouldn't guard me even if I gave her treats. My best friend is another story. She still hasn't figured out that there is a mesh screen door to the balcony. She's managed to destroy three of them already.

She drags her kennel from room to room, and it's big. She can lay flat in it. She tries to sleep on the bookshelves, the fireplace mantle, the headboard and flatscreen tv. She tries to curl up and put her paws beneath her like a cat, and whimpers and licks her legs when she can't. She whimpers like a cat, eerie coming from a dog. she's doing her best to scratch up the furniture and drapes like the cats.

At least she recognizes her owner. Sometimes she forgets where she lives and tries to go into other people's houses, or she'll scratch at their door trying to get in. We've gotten to know a lot of our neighbors this way before I moved out.

EDIT:
I just got feedback from co-workers that a lot of this is not funny.

 

@AnneCliche It's hilarious if you can turn off the thing that makes you feel sorry for animals when they hurt themselves. What's her name?

 

so i had a house rabbit called sparta, and at the time we lived in a pretty big flat and we had people around all the time. the rabbit was fairly used to people being around and had plenty of space to y'know, not be anywhere near the big scary people, but we still warned new people to be quiet around the bun and whatever.

so one day a friend came round and the rabbit was out and we told him the drill, y'know, rabbits probably gonna be scared of you. don't scare the rabbit. whatever. so he sits down to chill with us. about ten minutes later sparta comes in to investigate all these weird new smells which is totally normal until he hops right up to our new friend, jumps into his lap, climbs up his chest and over his face, and just plonks himself down right on top of his head to sleep. rabbits are weird.

also we had an outdoor cat (i know, i know it wasn't mine, i was like 9) that liked to make friends and basically just follow people to wherever the hell they were going. one day he'd been out for a few hours and we didn't think anything of it until we got a phonecall from the baby store asking us to please maybe come and collect our cat. we got there and it turned out he'd somehow gotten into the shop, gotten into one of the display cots and made himself cosy. some innocent new mother had been looking and seen this really cute cat toy, only to have it then get up and scare the shit out of her.

 

My dad, in his infinite wisdom, has deliberately trained the dogs to go insane barking when someone approaches the front door. Not the back door, mind you, which is the one people used to break into our house- just the front door.

Anyway, once upon a time, before we got the second dog, my sibling had community orchestra practice on Saturdays, and got a ride in every week with one of the cello players, a middle-aged lady who lived down the street from us. Elliot would, of course, go nuts barking at her whenever she showed up, at 10:30 AM every week, because Dad had taught him that you bark like a maniac when someone comes to the door.

One Saturday, which happened to be just after the spring Daylight Savings switchover, there was no orchestra practice.

Elly started barking at the door at precisely 11:30 AM.

He had learned the days of the week and was barking when she normally came, rather than when he actually heard her outside.

 

oh oh oh

okay. so my dad's dog juno is a little bit..... strange. she had a rough puppyhood, and it probably left its mark on her, psychologically.

like other labs, she cannot fucking get enough of swimming. loves it. that dog lives for swimming. unlike other labs, when she gets to swim in lakes, she does... a thing. juno dives underwater and picks up rocks, which is not in itself all that strange. like one-player fetch, with huge rocks instead of sticks. a bit quirky, but well within the boundaries of acceptability.

except for she will do this for hours, and she gets weird about it. she'll dive down, grab a rock, sprint back to shore, put down the rock. sprint back into the water, repeat. but she doesn't just leave them in a pile. she sorts them. she'll make a long line of rocks parallel to the shore, and she's extremely particular about what rock goes where. she'll rearrange them if a new rock doesn't "fit" in any available spots. if you mess them up, she gets distressed and fixes it. god only knows what criteria she's sorting them with, but she's got a plan.

it's so fucking bizarre to watch! when it's time to go, you have to trick her out of the water and into the car, and you can't let her see you throwing the rocks back or else she'll freak out. what a weird little thing she is. i'm very fond of our strange, slightly traumatized little beastie.

 

Harley Quinn, after the comic character, since she's my best friend's fave. I was going to get a male rottweiler and name it Tinkerbell, but yeah, we ended up with a furry princess instead.

I just got this story from my friend, M, since we no longer live together: So HQT (friend's last name starts with T) has a tragic love affair with sports utility vehicles. She can't always tell which belongs to M but she's all for taking car rides. They were hiking and at the end of the hike, the sun was still up but M was so tired she got angry at HQT because the dog kept going over to a particular vehicle. She wouldn't budge and kept dragging M back to this car.

Turns out M forgot she'd gone through a gigantic mud puddle and didn't recognize her own car and was trying to get into someone else's vehicle. HQT was not havin any of that.

I was crying I was laughing so hard because otherwise that dog will try to get into any SUV she finds with its doors open.

 

@applechime is Juno by any chance part border collie? bc borders are really neurotic in general, but esp about playing fetch

 

we think she's just a lab! juno doesn't actually care for fetch in general. she won't chase tennis balls or toys and she certainly won't bring them back. who knows what her brainweird is. she also mouths at all her toys like she's. I dunno? Sucking on them? and has a particular favourite that has had a dozen incarnations because she loves it to death. Good ol' hedgey-wedgey. Juno's a weird creature.

 

oooh oooohhhhhh!!! i have two cat stories! about different cats.

the first is one i've had told to me since i was little - i wasn't born when it actually happened - but way back when my parents lived in an apartment with one of those lil slots you put the mail through on the door, they went vacationing for a week or so and enlisted a friend to feed the cat while they were gone. UNFORTUNATELY, they completely forgot to give that friend the keys, so they were unable to get inside to, you know, actually feed the cat. So there they are, stuck outside, with a hungry cat and no way to get my parents or the keys home earlier... There's a bit of panicking, until someone has the brilliant idea to take paper plates, make lil holes in them and push them in through the mail slot. It works! Cat doesn't have to starve to death, they don't have to break the door down, everyone's happy!
the funny part of this story is that my parents came home to find multiple licked-clean paper plates lying under their bed, and for years afterwards the cat thought it was getting fed every time the mailman came by.

and the second one still makes me laugh every time i try to tell it bc our second cat was such an idiot, oh my god (maybe we should've suspected that when one of the first things she did in her new home was jump into the toilet and then look very upset no one told her there was water in there)
anyways so this cat! silly little cat. One day she's exploring the (empty) bathtub, and she has this fascination with running water, so we turn the tap on and she's super content batting at the water. Then my sisters and I have this brilliant idea of putting the plug in the bathtub so it slowly fills up w water. Cat is so distracted by the running water that she doesn't notice her paws are getting wet until there's like an inch of water already, at which point she takes up her front right paw and licks it dry. She then goes to do the same with her left paw, and puts the right paw back in the water, which obviously makes it wet again so she has to start all over, meaning she has to put the left paw back down...
She does this multiple times before realising something's not right and she's not actually getting any drier, my sisters and I are all dying laughing, and she finally decides to try something new
The new thing is the exact same thing. But with one of her back paws.
She sits down.
((and then flies out of the bathtub half a second later splashing water absolutely everywhere before refusing to talk to us for the rest of the day))
Like, this went on for minutes?? She never seemed to make the connection that paw down = paw wet? Damn I miss that cat

 

When I was in elementary school, my parents had another Boston Terrier named O'Reilly, and my dad had trained him to get frantically excited at the word "squirrel." It was basically code for "time to go outside"- we had quite a lot of squirrels living in the yard and he'd chase them, though he never got anywhere near catching them. Once when I was up early getting breakfast, my dad yelled "Squirrel!" and the dog, who was in the dining room, bolted for the door at top speed, which took him through the kitchen, which had a tiled floor. He took a 90 degree turn on tile with unclipped claws so fast that for a fraction of a second he was visibly running in place because his claws couldn't get traction on the tile.

I don't know if it really kicked up sparks, but that's how I remember it.

 

i have another juno one.

i mentioned that she was a bit weird! before we got her, she was on the verge of being put down because she was aggressive and bitey due to incredibly poor socialization, premature separation from her mother, and total isolation for most of the day. she had issues with touch, with other dogs, and most of all with food.

juno took a very long time to puzzle out what did and did not constitute "food". If she could fit it in her mouth, she figured it might as well go in her belly. it is a miracle that she is alive and healthy today, because I have personally watched her consume:

• small rocks
• pinecones
• large rocks
• 5 full size chocolate bars, plus wrappers
• all of the food on a plate that she knocked off the counter, and then the plate
• a fucking lightbulb

incredible. the only thing I have ever seen her refuse to eat was a shrimp. go figure. she'll eat glass, but god forbid she try seafood.

 

So when I was 7 years old, my duck Beakey (yes, that was her name) hatched out 12 ducklings. Like any good mother duck, she was pretty threatening, and the ducklings' father, Bill, stayed pretty far away from her because she was terrifying. So while the ducklings were growing up he'd hang out with us humans a lot because we were the only company he could get. He'd just hang out with whatever human(s) were outside, and if someone was working in the garden he's be right behind them digging around in the newly disturbed earth, looking for bugs and stuff. Bill was a good and friendly duck, I still miss him a bit.
So a couple of years later, one of Beakey's babies hatches out babies of her own. Bonnie comes waddling out of the duckhouse with her brand-new babies behind her, and Beakey comes over to sorta check things out. The moment she saw the babies, she just went "NOPE NOPE NOPE" and ran away.

Also this is more of a "this is a cute thing my pet did" thing than a story, but one time Guinea Pig Gus sighed (pretty loudly for such a tiny creature) and flopped down, using the food dish as a pillow. I was like "yeah, same here buddy".

 

Lupin has a lot of funny stories attached with her, because while she is a sweetie, she is not the best at being a cat. On various occasions she has -

-Fallen backwards off a (ground floor) windowsill because she tried to rear on her back paws and her stomach wouldn't fit.
- Got a stick tangled in her tail and spent the best part of an hour tearing around in a panic because she thought something was chasing her.
- Brought me such unique presents as: a stick, a piece of watermelon rind, a slice of apple, and a half-eaten crumpet. We conclude that she is either the weirdest burglar ever, or else a consummate beggar. She does have the biggest, greenest 'pity me' eyes of any creature I've yet to meet.

- Besides the stick incident, been startled/scared by such terrifying beasts as:
> A feather duster
> A large tiger plushie (she was asleep and dad thought it would be funny to loom it over her)
>The neck of a roast duck, offered as a treat. She snarled at it.

Oh, and the time the blender was on and I made the mistake of trying to pick her up. I still have the scar on my hand, over a decade later.

Love her dearly, but when the gods were handing out common sense I think she was playing Peggle. She is smart, however - while Tiger was still at the stage of 'headbutt the door and hope something happens' she had already figured out how to put her paw through the gap and undo the hook-and-eye catch. Also when her hindlegs were better and she was younger, you had to lock her out of a room you didn't want her going into, because door-handles were easy D:

EDIT: Oh! @Erica's story up there about the wet cat situation made me remember one when Tiger was a kitten. My brother was maybe eight or nine, and he took her everywhere with him. And I mean everywhere. However, she was locked out of the bathroom after a certain incident in which she saw my brother taking a leak and uh, assumed certain things about the stream of pee...

Cue screaming and screeching from everyone involved, one very upset and wet kitten and one very traumatised (although luckily uninjured) little brother. XDD

 

Re: pets being afraid of weird things: When Elliot was little, he was absolutely terrified of a soccer ball in the back yard. Barked at it a lot and wouldn't go near it for like a week. More recently, the neighbors up the hill from my parents' house got a half-grown big black dog of indeterminate breed. The first time Missy, who is scared of absolutely anything unfamiliar, saw him, she ran around at top speed in circles screaming. Apparently neither of my parents could breathe, they were laughing so hard. (Missy also once pooped on the floor out of sheer terror at a lump of styrofoam.)

 

Actually, speaking of Missy being inordinately terrified of everything, I have another good one:

Missy is almost pathologically addicted to tennis balls. My parents have a really big yard and she has an apparently bottomless well of energy, and Dad will go out there and chuck the ball for her for, like, hours. You have to be careful, though, because she's so addicted to tennis balls that she sometimes injures herself doing this, tries to hide it, and keeps bringing you the ball to throw even though she's visibly exhausted, limping, or on one memorable occasion, bleeding. The end result of this is that she's got basically no body fat even though she eats twice as much as Elliot, who's twice her size.

Once, we brought her in to the vet for a check-up. She was, predictably, completely and utterly terrified of everything, and managed to crawl her butt up my mom's arm while sitting down in an effort to get as far away from the scary stranger as possibly and nearer to the familiar safe person who will ~protect~ her. The vet had to give her a shot- I think it was a rabies vaccine. Except they quickly discovered that Missy was so tense, and had such good muscle tone, that they couldn't get the needle in.

 

Things the Girl Cat has done to wake me up at 4 AM because she wants cuddles:

1. Walk across my head
2. Climb up on me and make biscuits (OK if I happen to be sleeping on my stomach and she ends up giving me a back massage; otherwise her paws find the most tender places and stomp on them)
3. Put her mouth right up to my nostril and huff cat food breath directly up my nose
4. Stick her cold wet nose in my ear and do that snorty-chirpy-purry thing
5. The latest: NIBBLE ON MY FACE. She doesn't bite hard, just kind of opens her mouth and puts her teeth on my face, but GAAAAH

Bonus: after doing all this shit for an hour or so until I finally wake up enough to pet her, the VERY SECOND the alarm goes off she curls up and goes to sleep. U lil shit.