Food Lady’s Fabulous and Furry Fun House!
This is the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, who are currently living on my dining room bar table. They were living on my dining room floor, but a certain terrier figured out how to shove her nose between the wire top and plastic bottom of the Kittytat and use her anteater tongue to snake their kibbles, so they moved up in the world.
I brought these siblings home from work because they are so itty bitty, lost as they were in a sea of giant cats and older kittens. We don’t have a lot of free time at work to play with the cats or anything, so I thought exposing them to a home environment and dogs etc would be good socialization for them. However, they are SO small I fear for their safety underneath all the feet and teeth around here, so they are living in a guinea pig cage until they are a little larger. They are maybe 4 or 5 weeks old? I’m not fantastic at guestimating kitten ages.
This is the female:
She makes me laugh … the first day they came in I said “hey there little guy” at the cage door and she *hissed* at me with the teeniest, most unscary hiss ever. She’s a shoot first, realize she is afraid later kinda cat. She’s friendly now, but you can’t get a purr out of her for any amount of money.
This is her brother:
He’s shyer than she is, but always has some motorboat noises for me. He’s cuddlier, and doesn’t hiss at the dogs.
When they are more like 9 or 10 weeks old, I’ll bring them back to the shelter to get neutered and adopted. But for now, they just need some names. Any ideas?
“F’ could also stand for “What the F*CK is that, cuz it sure ain’t a dog!”
This is Tink. She is a 3lb “PomChi” (*vom*) that was an unclaimed stray at the shelter, and she was TERRIFIED. Imagine being 3 lbs and stuck in a cement and metal kennel surrounded by GIANTS, some of them big and hairy and LOUD, and some of them with fleshy, stinky hands that keep trying to hoist you in the air. She hasn’t bitten yet, but she was so worried that *I* was worried a bite was coming. And a bite never bodes well for a shelter dog, even if it’s from a little teeny mouth. So I brought Tink home too.
My goal is to turn her into a real dog so she will be adoptable. However, I’m not entirely sure that’s possible.
For starters, real dogs are not tinier than chickens.
Secondly, she doesn’t act like a dog. Whenever she gets confused about something, or undecided what to do, she starts turning in circles. it’s kind of disconcerting. Is this an abnormally small dog thing, or is she mentally challenged?
She’s a weird creature. She is completely anti-social, both with me and the other dogs. Well, first she screamed at the other dogs, and now she just ignores them completely. She ignores me too, unless I try to pick her up and then she might make some teeth at me, although she never follows through (because I always pick her up when she makes teeth at me). She doesn’t like to be picked up, and she doesn’t like to be on the ground either. At least not outside. She likes raw food, and hot dogs. That’s about all she likes. I cannot imagine what kind of life she must have lived before she ended up at the shelter. I also can’t imagine how anyone could have lost her, because I assume if she snuck out of their house or something she would have just started turning in circles, so she should have been easy to catch!
She is so little that when I brought her home yesterday, TWooie wasn’t even bent out of shape. I’m quite sure he didn’t even realize she was a dog, because he just looked at her and went about his business like she wasn’t there.
Today he has finally worked out that she is, in fact, a dog, and he’s only a little pissed off about it. He even let her wander the house all morning unmolested, which is unheard of in TWoosville. If anything, his brother’s nose is a lot more out of joint about it than his.
Everyone else is just confused.
Except for Dexter. I am certain he has not even realized she is in the house yet. He has paid her no attention whatsoever, even when she walked over top of him in her quest to escape the vacuum. Kind of the same way he pays no attention to me on an agility course.
But wait! Dexter HAS started paying attention to me on the agility course. Last night in class Auntie Fiona asked who the ringer for Dex was that I’d brought to class, because he’s like a whole new dog. All of our hard work and short sequencing is paying off. He ran a whole course, clean, and I didn’t even bust out the tuggie toy, or break the course up into small, manageable sections. We just tried running the whole thing and he went everywhere I asked, paid attention to my body language and was generally a very nice partner on the course. It’s a miracle!
Maybe one day we will even be able to trial again.
It’s the middle of July and the weather has returned to “frightful” so I think it’s a hot-bath-and-a-book kind of afternoon, so I’m signing off. But if you’re looking for a PomChi/weirdly small dog, let a sistah hook you up, and drop me an email!
