Pet Stories

Welcome to Pet Stories.This is a totally casual and informal page dedicated totally to pet stories and pet related articles. Hi, my name is Rob. In addition to my work on the Pets-Supplies-Online-Resource site, I guess I am the editor and initial author of this page (for now anyway).

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If you have a casual, informal pet story / article that you would like posted on this site, please feel free to Submit a Pet Story / Article.

6/23/2003 Cat Tails.

No I'm not referring to the plants that grow out in the wet lands... I'm talking about real cat tails. Does anyone know why they move around like they do? It's really a little strange if you watch them. I suppose there is a reason for it, but cats can be totally relaxed (I'm not sure if it moves when they are sleeping, I'll check into that the next time I think about it) and their tails will just do their own thing... Dogs tails seem to have a more direct relationship to their moods... I don't know of any cats that "wag" their tails :-)...

If anyone has an update on this... please let me know... (as you see this is a totally casual and informal article page).

6/15/2003 Quick Update.

Just a quick update... (I'm trying to keep this page current even though this site is still new and hasn't gotten a lot of traffic just yet, so please bear with me for now :-) )...

We did another dog-pet-sitting thing this weekend, but it was actually a much more low profile thing than the last time. This was just 2 nights and we just stopped in to let the dog out and feed her (as opposed to having the dog overnight)... This little dog did get along with our cats pretty well. The dog was a little bit older and mellower than our last visitor. I was really surprised at how well they got along... Not exactly playing with and loving each other :-) but at least tolerating each other...

The other little update (little visitor) that I wanted to mention is another toad! For those of you who don't know us (probably 99.9%) we have a toad that we picked up to keep for a few nights and have managed to keep this toad (his name is toader) for 3 years now!!! Anyway, my daughter (now 10) has once again found another one (toad, that is). We are not keeping this one, but really just toad-sitting... for the neighbor girl until she picks up the toad tomorrow... :-) (really...we are not keeping this one!)

Toads are pretty tough. They can survive for a while without food (like in the winter (especially when they are hibernating...). We do buy crickets occasionally, but most of the time (mostly in the warm weather), we just find various bugs outside (or sometimes, unfortunate bugs that made it into the house). Toads are pretty much only supposed to eat live food (which is kind of a bummer), but we have found that they will eat dry cat food, broken up into very small chunks and moved around with a small stick (like a popsickle stick)... but you must sit there and move it around so it looks liks something alive and moving...

5/28/2003 Pet Sitting Update.

I just wanted to drop a quick update in regarding my pet sitting articles. This past weekend we watched a friends dog that we have watched a number of times in the past. The difference now is that we now have cats instead of dogs... This does make a huge difference in our situation. I know that dogs and cats can get along quite well, especially once they get used to each other and work things out a little... Well, in the dog sitting situation, it is a whole different story.

It was actually quite a difficult situation and we needed to keep the cats and dog seperated pretty much the whole time. This really doesn't work out that well since each area of the house becomes a dog room or a cat room and there is really no pet socialization benefits going on here... :-)

Of course, as I had mentioned before, all dogs and cats have different personalities, you may find some cats and dogs that get along just fine with each other (or even like each other) but my experience (so far) is that dogs mostly get along with other dogs much much better than they do with cats (especially cats that they have not gotten to know yet).

We haven't actually done cat pet sitting at our house, but we have had cat "visitors". In this situation, they really almost just ignore each other (at least for short visits).

Based on our experiences, I would definately try to keep your pet sitting to "like animals" (like watching dogs if you have a dog or watching cats if you have cats (I am actually referring to in-house pet sitting)) rather than mixing cats and dogs... It can be done, of course, but it can be a difficult and stressful thing...

5/20/2003 Cat Exercises?

This site is still pretty new (at the time of this writing) so without much traffic, I am not expecting a lot of articles submitted from other people at this point so I'll have to fill in a little more myself...

I was just noticing that our cats are still in pretty good shape (they have not gotten overweight or anything), and they are still pretty young. I also remembered that our beagle had gotten a little bit overweight at times as she got older. So what this lead me to is...

What in the world do you do to help your cat to get enough exercise???

With dogs, I think it is pretty easy and obvious. You get them outside and take them for walks, jogs, runs, etc. but what do you do with cats? If they are getting overweight, probably your best option is just to really watch and adjust their diet as much as possible.

Other than that, I guess getting them to run and play as much as possible is pretty much the other option... Fortunately, we have two cats (brothers), and I think that helps quite a bit as far as exercise goes, because occasionally they will start going crazy chasing each other all over the place... That can be fun to watch (as long as they don't start getting too destructive! :-)

If anyone out there has some suggestions on this, please let me know...

Stop by again soon...

5/1/2003 Dog Sitting

I thought I would start this off with some notes on dog sitting. I think that I really got to know quite a bit more about a lot of different dogs and how dogs relate to each other during our dog sitting days... My wife, has always been a little animal crazy and especially dog crazy! What I mean, is that she really, really loves dogs (and all animals really).

She always used to tell people that whenever they go out of town (vacations, etc.) to let her know and we would watch their dogs. Well, of course, quite a few people took her up on it and we actually started to build a list of regulars that would drop their dogs off at our place, regularly, whenever they when on vacation. This was a pretty good deal for the other pet owners, since they didn't need to leave their dogs in a kennel and it was a very nice environment (we spoiled them a lot) and it was really cheap of free. Most people would pay us (and be glad to for what they got), and it would still be cheaper than a kennel.

Most of the time this was OK, although it could get a little crazy with our 2 dogs and then add another "visitor". There were a few times when the dog sitting would overlap and we would end up watching 2 at the same time, in addition to our own 2 dogs!

Anyway, in addition to learning quite a bit about different dogs in general, I also learned that most dogs will get along with each other quite well. Many will even seem to enjoy the company and play with the other dogs quite a bit. There are always some exceptions, of course. Some dogs just don't get along well with others, but I have found this to be quite the exception to the rule. There are also many dogs that will get along with each other most of the time but break out into a little fight on occasion. This is pretty normal and they rarely hurt each other. You need to use some common sense with dogs of extremely different sizes. For example if you are watching a German Shepherd and a toy poodle at the same time, you need to watch out for the smaller one (most of the time anyway :-) :-) )

Well, I guess I leave it at that for now... If you really love dogs and want to help people out quite a bit, dog sitting could be a great thing for you. I would definately start out slow, before offering to watch every person's dog that you run into. You also need to be extremely careful about safety. We had a fenced in yard and were always extremely careful with each dogs safety and never had a problem. I can't imagine the guilt that you could have if something happened to someone elses dog while you were watching them..

4/30/2003 Introduction

Although this entry will ultimately get buried under all future articles, for now it is new and for those of you who make it this far (after the future updates...) I would like to introduce myself and give you a brief update on some of our family's pets to start off with. My name is Rob, my wife's name is Dara and we have two children and currently have two cats, and have up until fairly recently had two dogs... My wife likes having pets in pairs to keep each other company... :-) We live in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago.

Our cats are orangeish tabby cats named peanutbutter and jingle (named by our kids). Those names are a little long sometimes and (IMHO) since cats don't usually respond to their names anyway, we use quite a few variations of their base-names. I usually refer to peanutbutter as "P" or homie-P and Jingle as Jing or homie-J. My daughter usually calls peanutbutter peanut... OK, you get the idea here...

This should also give you an idea about the forum that I intend to use for this particular page. Although the rest of the Pets-Supplies-Online-Resource site contains helpful information (related to pet products available online) that has been extensively researched on the internet and formally written up into specific and relevant pet related and product related pages, this page is very casual and informal.

We have also included the Submit a Pet Story / Article page for you to contribute to this site also. Feel free to participate if you like, or just check back to read when you want to relax and check out the latest pet stories and updates... I have used this forum for many years relating to personal pages, but have never used this type of forum in this way and with the option of including articles submitted to this site so the format will evolve as time goes on...

Pet Stories and Articles

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