Pet Store and Pet Ownership Horrors
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- Registrado
- 28 de Sep, 2015
Reptiles are so easy to be abused or neglected, especially because of how god damn easy it is to just go into petco and walk out with a ball python or a leopard gecko. Many teens do not realize that Balls can live almost 3 decades, yet they are merely treated as accessory pets to show off to their friends how 'sick and cool' it is to watch them struggle against live prey. The dangers of feeding live...it makes my stomach boil.
My BF's brother had a leopard gecko that was only fed once a month because the parents said they heard it was ok from the pet store guy. They had her on impactful sand and no heat lamp. Thing was emaciated and as big as my thumb for a 6 year old gecko. I'm talking almost no fat on her tail and was always bone cold. Dead crickets and shit littered her tank and it was rarely cleaned. No matter what I told them they refused to feed her more often, citing there was no time for them to go out and get food! Why even get the poor girl if you can't devote proper care? Surprised she even lived for that long.
Pet stores really do contribute to this. I always get very upset when I see colored sand and aquariums for species that need high humidity. Or when people perpetuate the myth that snakes need a different box to feed in, otherwise they will bite your hand if you try to hold them. My snakes in my rack system say otherwise...
I have over a dozen reptiles, a lot of which are advanced species, and I've worked at a reputable reptile shop last year and the amount of people I had to talk out of getting large monitors was astounding. The reptile hobby has become saturated with people who do little research and want an exotic pet. I have 12 years of reptile experience and a lot of that was in my teens, learning with family friends that were long time breeders and even I don't feel like I know everything I need to know. I was that kid that really got her passion from Steve Irwin and wanted to be a herpetologist when I grew up. I have devoted myself to being a herpetoculturist just out of the sheer love I have for my reptiles.
Typical day in the shop used to have questions like: "I have a leopard gecko, so I think I can handle this tegu". No, no you can not. My tegu has an 8 x 4 x 4 enclosure built by myself. Do you even have the space for that? Or the time to devote to taming your animal? Didn't matter, a lot of monitors still got sold.
"I'm looking for a beginner snake for my 8 year old, I think I'll get this Nicaraguan boa, he's cool.":////// Why not this kenyan sand boa? "He needs something way cooler." Ok, let's disregard that N boas can be very mouthy.
I always feel...kind of condescending when talking to people about reptiles because they are pets that don't get defended as much as other mammals and I really don't want to sound like a know it all. But I'm just so tired of seeing people on my FB or Insta feed getting baby ball pythons and using the little snake emoji when they have had no experience keeping other reptiles; and many of these folk are heavy weed smokers, which is extremely detrimental to a sake's respiratory system.
My BF's brother had a leopard gecko that was only fed once a month because the parents said they heard it was ok from the pet store guy. They had her on impactful sand and no heat lamp. Thing was emaciated and as big as my thumb for a 6 year old gecko. I'm talking almost no fat on her tail and was always bone cold. Dead crickets and shit littered her tank and it was rarely cleaned. No matter what I told them they refused to feed her more often, citing there was no time for them to go out and get food! Why even get the poor girl if you can't devote proper care? Surprised she even lived for that long.
Pet stores really do contribute to this. I always get very upset when I see colored sand and aquariums for species that need high humidity. Or when people perpetuate the myth that snakes need a different box to feed in, otherwise they will bite your hand if you try to hold them. My snakes in my rack system say otherwise...
I have over a dozen reptiles, a lot of which are advanced species, and I've worked at a reputable reptile shop last year and the amount of people I had to talk out of getting large monitors was astounding. The reptile hobby has become saturated with people who do little research and want an exotic pet. I have 12 years of reptile experience and a lot of that was in my teens, learning with family friends that were long time breeders and even I don't feel like I know everything I need to know. I was that kid that really got her passion from Steve Irwin and wanted to be a herpetologist when I grew up. I have devoted myself to being a herpetoculturist just out of the sheer love I have for my reptiles.
Typical day in the shop used to have questions like: "I have a leopard gecko, so I think I can handle this tegu". No, no you can not. My tegu has an 8 x 4 x 4 enclosure built by myself. Do you even have the space for that? Or the time to devote to taming your animal? Didn't matter, a lot of monitors still got sold.
"I'm looking for a beginner snake for my 8 year old, I think I'll get this Nicaraguan boa, he's cool.":////// Why not this kenyan sand boa? "He needs something way cooler." Ok, let's disregard that N boas can be very mouthy.
I always feel...kind of condescending when talking to people about reptiles because they are pets that don't get defended as much as other mammals and I really don't want to sound like a know it all. But I'm just so tired of seeing people on my FB or Insta feed getting baby ball pythons and using the little snake emoji when they have had no experience keeping other reptiles; and many of these folk are heavy weed smokers, which is extremely detrimental to a sake's respiratory system.
- Registrado
- 9 de Nov, 2014
I'm gonna add a happy story just because we all need one right now. My old neighbour had a huge and very well kept aviary in her garden full of rescued birds and she took incredibly good care of them. She used to sit in it on summer evenings and hand feed them and they'd flock all over her and generally seemed happy and healthy. The aviary was massive and had a number of roosting sheds and nest boxes. It was built over two small live trees and had a shallow pond and some dust wallows and all sorts of good bird stuff. The only bad thing was the half hour of thunderous noise every morning at sunrise which sounded like somebody tearing sheet steel interspersed with the occasional ear splitting scream of the two peacocks she kept loose in her garden.
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I had a guy at a pet store try very hard to sell me a Nile Monitor as an impulse buy because it was on sale and the manager wanted it out of the store. He seemed offended when I told him that carnivorous lizards that will one day grow to be almost as big as I am make poor impulse buys.
- Registrado
- 22 de Ago, 2013
A family we know recently got a dog (a standard poodle, IIRC). They named it after my brother who passed away recently, since their son was a good friend of his (which is fine, and yes -- it relates to the story).
Apparently the dog isn't trained at all. It doesn't know commands and they let it walk all over the furniture, despite it being pretty big already. My mum's visited them and the dog a few times, and she says they talk to it in the same voices they use to talk to other humans in. The dog might be smart, but they're not that smart. I always thought that you're meant to talk to most animals in a higher-pitched voice so that they know they're being talked to -- even if they're intelligent animals. I mean, if a dog's got a shoe in its mouth it's not going to understand you if you say "drop" in a normal voice if it hasn't had any training...
They tried taking the dog to puppy training but apparently it was "too hard" or some bullshit. Wow, having an animal and raising it from a baby requires effort! Who would've thought? (Not them, clearly.)
Normally I wouldn't care, but they went out of their way to name the dog after my brother. I want to tell them to at least try to put some effort in, but I know I'd get too worked up about it. I've been so annoyed by it that I had a dream I was insulting them. If only...
I haven't gone to visit them myself since a) I don't really like the family much and b) I'm not good with dogs. Maybe once they actually start giving a shit about the dog I'll reconsider.
I'm sorry to hear about your brother. I do have something info about dog training that might help you feel a bit better about the situation with the poodle, though.
For one thing, poodles are one of the easiest to train breeds of dog out there because they are super intelligent. They rule the obedience circuit and are very quick learners. If the dog is young it will probably settle down a bit on its own in time.
Also, you don't actually need to use a different voice/inflection for a dog to understand you're talking to it. Just saying its name is enough for it to realise you're directing your speech at them. Dogs read your tone somewhat, as opposed to volume or pitch, but that's not really how they understand you. Mostly, they read your body language. It's actually not desirable to use a high pitched tone when talking to a dog (tends to over excite them), or a loud voice when they misbehave. You just need to be firm with your voice and body language for the dog to get across when it has misbehaved. They can tell by your body language if you're pleased or unhappy with them, and when you're relaxed or upset.
Often the best way to deal with an overexcited dog is to kind of ignore it. Like, if it's doing something objectionable like jumping up on you for your attention, the most effective way to get them to stop is to stand up straight, walk straight past them and not give them any attention. Then, when they've stopped trying to jump and they're sitting or lying by you and exhibiting acceptable behaviour you can acknowledge them. That honestly works really well. To this day the only person who my aunt and uncle's dogs won't jump on is me, because I did exactly that from the start and they realised from my body language that they weren't going to get anywhere with that behaviour. When they sit I talk to them and pat them and tell them they're good dogs.
I understand it must be hard to see them be seemingly apathetic about the dog they named after your late brother, but they definitely haven't irreparably screwed the dog up.
- Registrado
- 3 de Feb, 2013
I want a water dragon or bearded dragon someday but if I was to get a water dragon I'd be building it a custom enclosure with a pond and shit because if you're going to do something you do it right and you do it to excel. I don't like to settle for just standard passable care for animals because they are all beautiful and deserve so much more than they get.
Like even the crabs I went to extreme lengths for but I wasn't able to give them above and beyond care because of space constraints. If I could have I would have gotten a bigger tank for the same amount of crabs I had because 9 crabs in a 50 gallon was pushing it real hard and that was before the 10 gallon per crab guideline was set in place.
- Registrado
- 21 de Ene, 2015
You sound like a friend of mine. She has many snakes (including my corn snake who I re-homed her to because I was moving out of the country) in a rack system, ranging from smaller sorts to massive boas, then having specially built enclosures for her iguanas and monitors. I admire her in her passions for her reptiles as well as high regard for animals in general. She's also passing on that love and respect to her kid, which really warms the cockles of my heart. Reptiles need a lot more people to stand up for them considering the sorts of people you mention. Giving people the right information to properly care for them is a lot more important than making people feel a little stupid at first. Just sad that there are so many who don't care and will get them as accessories and nothing more.
- Registrado
- 28 de Sep, 2015
I will staunchly defend reptiles all my life. My snakes are more comfortable and actually eat better in their rack system but I have gotten a lot of people who know nothing about reptiles cite that they are cruel. There is a lot of misinformation out there and many people don't do a quick google search before they decide to get a pet. It's usually all impulse.
Monitors are the absolute worst next to giant boas for impulse buys. The shop I used to work at had burmese on display and I had to tell many people that no, you can't buy them and no, they won't stay that little forever.
Also had a shit ton of kids come in. I love teaching kids about reptiles but most of them throw screaming tantrums or get scared. Had to pass a no one under 16 without parent/ no one under 5 period policy.
Side note, figured you guys would enjoy seeing my tegu sleeping in my bed this morning :')
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- Registrado
- 31 de Ago, 2015
I once knew a girl who claimed she was feeding her snake a vegan diet. One of my friends paid her $100+ just so he could get the poor thing off of her hands and give it to his cousin who raises snakes for a living.
- Registrado
- 28 de Sep, 2015
Honestly trying to figure out how you can feed a snake a vegan diet. Vegan sausage links? But jfc that is horrible.
- Registrado
- 6 de Jun, 2013
My cousin belongs in this thread.
She's 15 years old now, and throughout her entire life she's been an IRL version of that one girl from tiny toons, only way bitchier. Basically she'll pester my grandpa into getting her a pet (or sometimes she'll catch a small wild animal, several geckos have suffered this fate) and she'll be all about it for maybe a month, then one of about three things will happen...
1) She'll dump it on my grandpa and make him take care of it.
2) She'll stop feeding it and it dies.
3) She'll actively murder it herself.
The only time I can actively recall the third happening was when my mom made me give my pet turtle to her. As soon as she got it home, she dropped it on its back until it died. Additionally, she likes to let her pets shit everywhere and doesn't clean it up, and for about two years I had to live in that environment. She also tends to leave plates of half-eaten food in the floor and at least when I was living with my aunt (Who lives on disability checks and spends all her time smoking weed and watching WWE when she's not being a horrible person) she would listen to Nicki Minaj and horrible country music constantly, and would leave her TV on some DVD menu when she left for school and I wasn't allowed to turn it off or else my aunt would ground me from going to the library... There's more but I've gone way off-topic and said way too much.
She's 15 years old now, and throughout her entire life she's been an IRL version of that one girl from tiny toons, only way bitchier. Basically she'll pester my grandpa into getting her a pet (or sometimes she'll catch a small wild animal, several geckos have suffered this fate) and she'll be all about it for maybe a month, then one of about three things will happen...
1) She'll dump it on my grandpa and make him take care of it.
2) She'll stop feeding it and it dies.
3) She'll actively murder it herself.
The only time I can actively recall the third happening was when my mom made me give my pet turtle to her. As soon as she got it home, she dropped it on its back until it died. Additionally, she likes to let her pets shit everywhere and doesn't clean it up, and for about two years I had to live in that environment. She also tends to leave plates of half-eaten food in the floor and at least when I was living with my aunt (Who lives on disability checks and spends all her time smoking weed and watching WWE when she's not being a horrible person) she would listen to Nicki Minaj and horrible country music constantly, and would leave her TV on some DVD menu when she left for school and I wasn't allowed to turn it off or else my aunt would ground me from going to the library... There's more but I've gone way off-topic and said way too much.
- Registrado
- 20 de Ago, 2015
I hate these people.
No, your carnivorous pet will not survive by eating only leafy greens. I don't understand why these people can't just get a rabbit if they don't want to feed their pets meat.
- Registrado
- 18 de Feb, 2014
Back when I lived in Texas (over 15 years ago), the local mall had a pet store that not only sold puppies and kittens but also prairie dogs. The prairie dogs were kept in a tank with nothing for them to dig in, or play with for that matter. I personally don't even think that prairie dogs really make good pets.
I also have a memory of looking into this column-style tank that looked somewhere between 5 and 10 gallons and was one-third full of baby iguanas. Yes, full, I don't remember seeing anything on the bottom of the tank except more iguanas. I do, however, still remember the sound of their little skulls colliding with the glass as they tried to escape all of the people walking by.
I also have a memory of looking into this column-style tank that looked somewhere between 5 and 10 gallons and was one-third full of baby iguanas. Yes, full, I don't remember seeing anything on the bottom of the tank except more iguanas. I do, however, still remember the sound of their little skulls colliding with the glass as they tried to escape all of the people walking by.
- Registrado
- 24 de Feb, 2015
A while back, I knew an individual. I wouldn't really call him a "friend," but we hung out with him. He had a fair amount of lolcow tendencies, actually. But that's off topic. See, he had a cat. A pretty adorable one, too. Probably the friendliest cat I'd ever met. This "friend" used to take sadistic delight in psychologically tormenting the poor thing. As far as I know, he never physically abused it, but he had a habit of doing things to intentionally scare it. For example, like most cats, this one was scared of the vacuum cleaner. So he straddled the poor animal so it couldn't get away and kept turning the vacuum on and off. The cat was visibly terrified, but he didn't care. Another thing he'd do would be to hold the cat near the sink and turn the water on to scare it. He apparently did this often enough for the cat to not allow people to pick it up when it was in the kitchen. Granted, I did see him treat the cat nicely sometimes, too. Like, he'd pet it and play with it like a normal person some times, and it seemed to hold at least some affection for him (though it was friendly with everyone, so maybe it was just the way it was). But the cat's nerves were completely shot. It was really skittish most of the time. Like, getting up off the couch could scare it and make it jump into the air. I felt bad for it.
- Registrado
- 29 de Sep, 2015
One of the malls in my state used to have a pet store, and they sold puppies. The puppies where in tiny glass cages, with no room or bedding or anything. I felt heartbroken for them. I wondered how it was legal to let them live like that!
Thankfully, the store is now closed and I hope the best for the puppies
Thankfully, the store is now closed and I hope the best for the puppies
- Registrado
- 31 de Mar, 2015
Where do you live?
That shit is commonplace in the US. Not so much anymore, but every PetLand you come across has racks of puppies and kittens just like this. It's perfectly legal, too. The minimum requirements for any animal in the US is a container large enough to stand up and turn around and regular access to food and water. That's it. Everything else is down to local law enforcement to decide. Even then, the federal government only has a handful of people to check every single commercial animal facility in the country, and it just doesn't get done. It's very easy to keep animals in the US in piss poor conditions and get away with it, especially critters like lions and bears because there's just not enough manpower to enforce it. The documentary The Elephant in the Living Room, which is available on Netflix, focuses on these problems a lot. I've heard Blood Lions touches on it as well but I've heard mixed reviews about it.
- Registrado
- 26 de Mar, 2013
I've got two stories, one with a sorta happy ending and another with a not-so-happy ending. The happier one is a bit convoluted, though, so it'll have to wait. If you read the one I've got right now, prepare for a little bit of powerleveling and some pretty autistic levels of detail. It's something involving my youth that I haven't told many people about, so I had a bit of a floodgate effect while writing it.
^^ TL;DR: a cat my family has dies and it makes my mother go crazy (...crazier, anyway).
For most of when I was growing up, my family and I lived on this kinda large, wooded plot of land out in the boonies of this little backwater town in Texas. We lived in a doublewide which, like most doublewides, had mostly steel beams for a foundation that raised it a few feet above the ground and was set on two parallel strips of concrete that ran the length of the house. Also like most doublewides, it had this plastic skirting that you were supposed to put up around the perimeter of the house to sort of conceal the underside of it but if you've ever lived in one of these things, you probably know from experience how flimsy and shitty that skirting is. It's really easy to punch out and all it takes is a tropical storm or some other above average inclement weather to blow it all away and leave the foundation exposed. That being said, our house wound up playing host to all sorts of critters. For the first six or seven years we lived there, we had problems with mice, rats, possums, even lizards, and the especially crafty ones sometimes wound up finding their way inside the house (there's nothing like waking up at two in the morning to take a piss, shuffling into the bathroom and finding a fucking possum chilling out on your towel rack). So when we begun to take note of some stray cats wandering around the property, we figured we should start feeding them so they'd maybe stick around and stave off some of the more invasive critters.
It worked pretty well and within about six months our pest problems were gone, though a new problem that we probably should've predicted was pretty quick to burgeon; the strays were breeding and looked to be doing so at a faster rate than we'd be able to keep up with. To try and slow it down, we decided to snag two of them, the only two females in one of the litters, and raise them ourselves as indoor cats and there begins the ownership horror story because at the time, we weren't really cat people and didn't know shit about taking care of them and while we stumbled through the obvious stuff decently enough, some of the more serious things didn't get taken care of until they made themselves apparent (eg, if you're going to keep a female cat but don't plan to let it breed, you need to have it spayed, not doing so will end up killing it). We'd noticed the other litters born on our property weren't very healthy (most died as kittens), but the two we'd plucked seemed just fine, one was named Jersey because of her black and white coloration, and the other was a calico we'd named Lola (I forget why, I think it was for the Kinks song or something). It's probably important to note that most of this was my mother's idea and she ended up arbitrarily assigning ownership of the cats, saying that Jersey was hers and that Lola would be mine and my brother's. I use the word "arbitrarily" because neither me or my brother had ever said or even implied that we wanted a pet to be responsible for, and we were both pretty sure that if either us ever moved out and wanted to take this cat with us, our mother wouldn't allow it. It seemed she mostly said the cat was "ours" just so she could shoehorn any prospective vet bills onto my brother, who had recently gotten his first job.
It was especially funny it worked out this way because though my brother had sort of a soft spot for her, I never particularly liked Lola. She was one of those cats that demanded attention from people but at the very same time was unreasonably skittish, which often led to her trying to beat down your bedroom door if it was closed (or just sit outside of it caterwauling), not do anything when you'd eventually open the door, then tearing off to the other end of the house like you'd tried to kill her if, god forbid, you moved towards her too suddenly. I certainly didn't hate her or anything (how do you even hate a pet?), but she was kind of just annoying to me at the end of the day and for that reason, I never really got attached to her, though the rest of my family did.
About five years after taking her and Jersey in (when I was in high school), Lola died somewhat suddenly of a pulmonary disease. I say "somewhat" because it all took place over the span of about twenty four hours, though earlier in the day, me and my brother both noticed something was wrong with her. Pro-tip, if you can pick a cat up from wherever it was sitting and set it down somewhere else and it makes no attempt to move or even change its position in any way, you to need to take it to a fucking vet because something's wrong with it. Doubly so if the cat's on the skittish side. This was basically what was happening with Lola, she wasn't really responding to being touched despite her usual jumpiness, and when we picked her up and put her in another spot, she'd kinda just listlessly flop over. For this reason alone, we knew whatever the problem was, it was serious and we tried our best to convince our mother to take the cat to the vet, but she wound up blowing it off and even making irrational excuses for the behavior when we insisted that she see it for herself. I didn't have money or a license so there really wasn't anything I could do at that point and though employed, my brother wasn't in any better of a situation since he was having trouble just affording the gas to get back and forth to work. Our dad might have taken us seriously but was hours away doing on-call work. We'd pretty much hit a dead end and being largely indifferent to it, I just shrugged my shoulders and went on about my business. My brother kept Lola in his room and tried to do the same.
At some point early the next morning, he was woken up by the cat doing some sort of dry-heave in an attempt to breathe. I was awake in the next room marathoning a video game and was the second to see her. It was...fucking awful. Like, I'd killed some of the possums and rats that had gotten into our house in the past, but it somehow hadn't prepared me for seeing a cat in its death throes. She was just slumped back in this papasan chair that she'd spent the entire day in, her eyes were dilated and there was some sort of frothy shit coming out of her mouth every time she heaved. It was the most human thing I recall ever seeing an animal do, desperately clinging to life even though it was so clearly futile. It was also the closest I came to being legitimately upset by the whole thing. Like the cat or not, she didn't deserve to die at all, let alone in such a shitty, miserable way.
Well, we obviously woke our parents up and they scrambled to get Lola to some emergency animal clinic in a frantic attempt to save her, but I think we all knew it was the end of the line, I remember my dad later telling me that she was practically dead by the time they got there. I stayed behind with my brother and tried to go to sleep. After it was all said and done, the vet told my parents it was some sort of heart irregularity that did Lola in (either it was too small or too large, I can't quite recall) and that it was actually abnormal for her to have lived as long as she did, so even if we'd taken her to the vet when my brother and I noticed something was off, there likely wouldn't have been anything that could've been done for her. My family was pretty well devastated, though my mother took it the hardest. I guess she realized that if she'd listened to us, she might have at least spared the cat some unnecessary suffering and she probably felt guilty as a result. She's never been a very stable person though, and whether I'm right about that or not, she spent the next few weeks following Lola's death lashing out at the rest of us, berating me and my brother for not grieving "enough" and generally being an enormous, insufferable bitch, doing and saying things that made it pretty clear that she was coming unglued. She had my dad put a statue over the spot where he'd buried Lola, and every now and again, you'd see her standing out there talking to it. When she found out the rest of us weren't doing the same, she made it a point to take these little passive-aggressive pot shots at us over it ("I've gone out there and kept Lola company every day this week. Why haven't you?") and since I was the only person that didn't really show any emotion over the cat dying, I heard the most of it.
It all came to head when she had this massive fucking meltdown and locked herself in her room and left the rest of us thinking she was about to off herself (albeit, she hadn't ever explicitly said anything to that effect). My dad and brother were at work, so I was the only other person at home at the time and in the minute or so I'd gone outside to find something I could beat her door down with, she left the room, hopped in her truck and took off. None of us could get a hold of her, though she showed back up about an hour later, right before my dad got home, and she had brought two siamese-manx kittens with her. They were litter-mates that she'd gotten from an old co-worker. She said one was going to be named "Lolita", and the other me or my brother could name.
None of us knew how to respond to that. For the next day or so, we kinda just went with it and noticed that her behavior was improving. I guess afterwards we all just decided without actually saying so that if letting her have some sort of replacement for Lola kept her from acting completely batshit, we could deal. I lived with my parents for another five(ish) years after Lola died, moving out just before I was twenty one. At that point, there were about thirteen cats living there (I say "about", because I really, seriously stopped paying attention the last year I was living there and lost count). Every six months to a year after Lola died, my mother would bring in another one or two kittens either from the strays outside or from a friend, insisting that one of them be given a name that was some sort of derivative of "Lola". Like she did with my brother, she would say some of these cats were "mine" so I'd have to take care of its vet bills, etc, though unlike my brother I never made any attempt to take any of them with me or even express any desire to have a cat as a pet, the situation was so bad by the time I moved out, I was thrilled just to be getting the fuck away from it all. I don't even want to know how many they've got over there now.
It worked pretty well and within about six months our pest problems were gone, though a new problem that we probably should've predicted was pretty quick to burgeon; the strays were breeding and looked to be doing so at a faster rate than we'd be able to keep up with. To try and slow it down, we decided to snag two of them, the only two females in one of the litters, and raise them ourselves as indoor cats and there begins the ownership horror story because at the time, we weren't really cat people and didn't know shit about taking care of them and while we stumbled through the obvious stuff decently enough, some of the more serious things didn't get taken care of until they made themselves apparent (eg, if you're going to keep a female cat but don't plan to let it breed, you need to have it spayed, not doing so will end up killing it). We'd noticed the other litters born on our property weren't very healthy (most died as kittens), but the two we'd plucked seemed just fine, one was named Jersey because of her black and white coloration, and the other was a calico we'd named Lola (I forget why, I think it was for the Kinks song or something). It's probably important to note that most of this was my mother's idea and she ended up arbitrarily assigning ownership of the cats, saying that Jersey was hers and that Lola would be mine and my brother's. I use the word "arbitrarily" because neither me or my brother had ever said or even implied that we wanted a pet to be responsible for, and we were both pretty sure that if either us ever moved out and wanted to take this cat with us, our mother wouldn't allow it. It seemed she mostly said the cat was "ours" just so she could shoehorn any prospective vet bills onto my brother, who had recently gotten his first job.
It was especially funny it worked out this way because though my brother had sort of a soft spot for her, I never particularly liked Lola. She was one of those cats that demanded attention from people but at the very same time was unreasonably skittish, which often led to her trying to beat down your bedroom door if it was closed (or just sit outside of it caterwauling), not do anything when you'd eventually open the door, then tearing off to the other end of the house like you'd tried to kill her if, god forbid, you moved towards her too suddenly. I certainly didn't hate her or anything (how do you even hate a pet?), but she was kind of just annoying to me at the end of the day and for that reason, I never really got attached to her, though the rest of my family did.
About five years after taking her and Jersey in (when I was in high school), Lola died somewhat suddenly of a pulmonary disease. I say "somewhat" because it all took place over the span of about twenty four hours, though earlier in the day, me and my brother both noticed something was wrong with her. Pro-tip, if you can pick a cat up from wherever it was sitting and set it down somewhere else and it makes no attempt to move or even change its position in any way, you to need to take it to a fucking vet because something's wrong with it. Doubly so if the cat's on the skittish side. This was basically what was happening with Lola, she wasn't really responding to being touched despite her usual jumpiness, and when we picked her up and put her in another spot, she'd kinda just listlessly flop over. For this reason alone, we knew whatever the problem was, it was serious and we tried our best to convince our mother to take the cat to the vet, but she wound up blowing it off and even making irrational excuses for the behavior when we insisted that she see it for herself. I didn't have money or a license so there really wasn't anything I could do at that point and though employed, my brother wasn't in any better of a situation since he was having trouble just affording the gas to get back and forth to work. Our dad might have taken us seriously but was hours away doing on-call work. We'd pretty much hit a dead end and being largely indifferent to it, I just shrugged my shoulders and went on about my business. My brother kept Lola in his room and tried to do the same.
At some point early the next morning, he was woken up by the cat doing some sort of dry-heave in an attempt to breathe. I was awake in the next room marathoning a video game and was the second to see her. It was...fucking awful. Like, I'd killed some of the possums and rats that had gotten into our house in the past, but it somehow hadn't prepared me for seeing a cat in its death throes. She was just slumped back in this papasan chair that she'd spent the entire day in, her eyes were dilated and there was some sort of frothy shit coming out of her mouth every time she heaved. It was the most human thing I recall ever seeing an animal do, desperately clinging to life even though it was so clearly futile. It was also the closest I came to being legitimately upset by the whole thing. Like the cat or not, she didn't deserve to die at all, let alone in such a shitty, miserable way.
Well, we obviously woke our parents up and they scrambled to get Lola to some emergency animal clinic in a frantic attempt to save her, but I think we all knew it was the end of the line, I remember my dad later telling me that she was practically dead by the time they got there. I stayed behind with my brother and tried to go to sleep. After it was all said and done, the vet told my parents it was some sort of heart irregularity that did Lola in (either it was too small or too large, I can't quite recall) and that it was actually abnormal for her to have lived as long as she did, so even if we'd taken her to the vet when my brother and I noticed something was off, there likely wouldn't have been anything that could've been done for her. My family was pretty well devastated, though my mother took it the hardest. I guess she realized that if she'd listened to us, she might have at least spared the cat some unnecessary suffering and she probably felt guilty as a result. She's never been a very stable person though, and whether I'm right about that or not, she spent the next few weeks following Lola's death lashing out at the rest of us, berating me and my brother for not grieving "enough" and generally being an enormous, insufferable bitch, doing and saying things that made it pretty clear that she was coming unglued. She had my dad put a statue over the spot where he'd buried Lola, and every now and again, you'd see her standing out there talking to it. When she found out the rest of us weren't doing the same, she made it a point to take these little passive-aggressive pot shots at us over it ("I've gone out there and kept Lola company every day this week. Why haven't you?") and since I was the only person that didn't really show any emotion over the cat dying, I heard the most of it.
It all came to head when she had this massive fucking meltdown and locked herself in her room and left the rest of us thinking she was about to off herself (albeit, she hadn't ever explicitly said anything to that effect). My dad and brother were at work, so I was the only other person at home at the time and in the minute or so I'd gone outside to find something I could beat her door down with, she left the room, hopped in her truck and took off. None of us could get a hold of her, though she showed back up about an hour later, right before my dad got home, and she had brought two siamese-manx kittens with her. They were litter-mates that she'd gotten from an old co-worker. She said one was going to be named "Lolita", and the other me or my brother could name.
None of us knew how to respond to that. For the next day or so, we kinda just went with it and noticed that her behavior was improving. I guess afterwards we all just decided without actually saying so that if letting her have some sort of replacement for Lola kept her from acting completely batshit, we could deal. I lived with my parents for another five(ish) years after Lola died, moving out just before I was twenty one. At that point, there were about thirteen cats living there (I say "about", because I really, seriously stopped paying attention the last year I was living there and lost count). Every six months to a year after Lola died, my mother would bring in another one or two kittens either from the strays outside or from a friend, insisting that one of them be given a name that was some sort of derivative of "Lola". Like she did with my brother, she would say some of these cats were "mine" so I'd have to take care of its vet bills, etc, though unlike my brother I never made any attempt to take any of them with me or even express any desire to have a cat as a pet, the situation was so bad by the time I moved out, I was thrilled just to be getting the fuck away from it all. I don't even want to know how many they've got over there now.
^^ TL;DR: a cat my family has dies and it makes my mother go crazy (...crazier, anyway).
- Registrado
- 3 de Feb, 2013
Speaking of parents never letting you take a clearly dying animal to the vet, we had two guinea pigs, one died suddenly at the age of 5 (like we had given them some treats like we always do when we cut up vegetables for supper and they start squealing for food. After we finished eating we look in their house and one of them had just dropped dead) the remaining piggy lived to be about 7 but around the age of 6 he developed a horrifiying tumor/abcess thing
and it popped one day and it looked like the inside was full of clusters of grape things
Anyway I also feel bad because when we got the piggies we didn't know I was allergic to them (I was only allergic to them as adults because I can cuddle baby piggies with no issues) so I physically couldn't clean their cage so my mum got stuck with it. For some reason she thought it was a great idea to put a fucking grate for them to stand on instead of a flat surface as they should have had because all their dumps would fall through the grate amd it would be easier to clean for her (still a stupid fucking idea) and I think that fucked up their feet pretty badly and I still feel bad about if to this day because I was in no position to build them a larger cage and I couldn't clean them without getting sick as fuck
- Registrado
- 26 de Mar, 2013
Yeah, funnily enough, my kinda happier story involved me buying and raising some live pinkies from a douchey, fucked up co-worker so he wouldn't feed them to his tarantula. Raising orphaned pinkies is a really tough thing to do though (of the ten I bought, only four survived) and in all the youtube homework I did on it, I remember them explicitly saying not to put any sort of wirey type thing on the bottom of the habitat because as they got older, they'd develop bumblefoot.
- Registrado
- 16 de Jun, 2014
I had to tell a different relative not to bathe with her Bearded Dragon because that was unsanitary as fuck. The beardie now has a calcium deficiency but I will give her credit, she took him to the vet and got him the shots he needed. He's still not in the best shape, but at least she cares enough to get him proper medical care.