𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Yeah, this one’s a lap cat too. I’ve loved all our cats, but it’s great when they’re snugglers. Tissot has a thing, though, that we say for him: “Both hands! No devices!” When he’s on you, he wants your full attention. It can make getting things done difficult, but it’s probably healthy that he forces us to take breaks from our computers.

Does Zoey shed much? We adopted Tissot when he was 5, and I expected him to create a nightmare for the vacuums, but strangely he doesn’t really shed much, for all the long hair he has. Loves to be brushed, but we never get anything off him! Is Zoey the same way?

He says thank you, and you’re pretty, too.

I love Zoey.

But do not tell my boys. One would probably love Zoey, too - he’s a cat’s cat, and a white-ish version of Zoey - but the other is fantastically jealous.

Friendly, pretty, outgoing, and wants to be involved in anything anyone is doing:

I do that occasionally; maybe it’s me, maybe it’s my client. But I also prefer to continue a thread, so I may have done it on purpose. In this case, though, I probably misunderstood you, and thought you were suggesting that the cultural shift was for silly activist reasons, and that it was better back in the good old days. Or that the only reason to keep cats indoors is because of the damage they do to wildlife.

Mea culpa

I’m not even talking about the controversy about cat impact on wildlife; I’m referring to the statistical life expectancy of outdoor cats in the US. If anyone isn’t satisfied with the one link I provided, I can find more: outdoor feline life expectancy is statistically drastically shorter than strictly indoor life expectancy. All I did was list the risks - the truth is in the statistics. But everyone who has that one outdoor cat that lived to 27 thinks their anecdotal experience trumps science 🙄.

I can’t speak to Norway. Maybe the feline diseases aren’t rampant there yet. Maybe the Norwegians have long ago exterminated all of their mid-range predators in populated areas. I doubt grandparent up there lives in a place where wolves are roaming around freely. You have coyotes or something similar there in your rural communities, my Norwegian friend from a couple comments up? Maybe the fact that few, if any, European countries have anything like the US car culture keeps streets safer for loose pets.

But in the US, letting cats outdoors statistically reduces their life expectancies. That’s not my opinion; it’s in the data.

They die more if they’re let outdoors. Statistically, outdoor cats have half a life expectancy of 2-5 years, vs 12-20 of indoor-only cats.

We’ve owned rural homes a couple of times. One time, we owned a house on 5 acres at the end of a dirt-and-gravel road a half mile from the nearest paved road. On the other side of our neighbor’s house was a culvert, with an easement - a dirt “road” - that the irrigation company inspectors would use about once a month or so to check the state of the culvert. We were one of three houses at the end of that dead-end gravel road. At the time, (in the late 90’s) we had cats we’d let out during the day and bring in at night. During the four years we lived there, we had one cat that was killed by being hit by one of the irrigation inspectors. That easement was used by one truck, once a month, and it killed our cat. We lost a second cat to coyotes; at least the cat hit by the truck didn’t have the terrifying death of being torn apart by coyotes.

Maybe you’ll be lucky, and your cats won’t go into the roads. Maybe where you live you don’t have coyotes, or neighbors with dogs, or large owls. Maybe you’ll be lucky and your cats won’t meet any other cats and get infected with one of the exceedingly common diseases of feline leukemia, feline aids, or distemper. Maybe you don’t have neighbors who poison their pest mice and rats that your cats might find and eat and themselves die in agony from indirectly ingesting rat poison. Maybe you live somewhere without rabies (although I think it’s even gotten to the UK, now).

Maybe you don’t care if your cats get killed. But it you do care, keep your cats indoors. If you live somewhere rural, there are predators that can and will take a cat. If you live somewhere urban, it’s even more likely your cat will get killed by a car. And even if you have a perfect barrier that your cats won’t find a way over or under, it won’t stop poisoned rodents from getting into your yard where your cats can get at them, and your cats will get fleas and ticks and bring them into the house. Fleas are only a minor nuisance, sure; not a horrific, lingering death from rabies, and maybe you think you’ll use a flea dip - although keep in mind flea dips can give cats neurological diseases: it’s a poison that’s spread through their systems, and some cats react poorly to it.

But, again maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe for you the inconvenience of cleaning a litter box is worth the risk of your cat being killed. If being inconvenienced is your motivation, may I recommend a Litter Robot. They’re pricey, but worth every penny, and they last for years. And you’ll almost certainly enjoy your cat’s company for many more years.

Problem is, you have to play all of them to get all the specialized terminology, and it sometimes overlaps between games.

I’ll bet I’ve played at least one game you haven’t. I know there are dozens of games I haven’t played, and even if I had time and wanted to dedicate all of my free time to RPGs, I doubt I could play then all enough to learn them well enough to recognize each from a half-dozen words in a meme.

Who’s your manager? I want to speak to them.

I vote post titles must be prefixed with “[GAMENAME]”. Many of these posts are just noise in my feed, without context.

Oof, I mean, CGI can go a long way, but still… some actors stay young-looking (Johnny Depp did, for a long time), but it’s a large cast and not all of them will. And they have to do it for an entire season, which gets expensive.

But, we’ll see. My money’s on a fast-forward into the 90’s, like someone else suggested.

That’s probably wise. 90’s nostalgia seems to be “in” these days.

How so? Like the ones they’ve done before? The season jumps ahead a few years? That’s what I’m expecting; I guess I’m saying it’s not quite right still calling them “kids.”

They could do something like X-Men: Days of Future Past, where the Earth has become a sort out Vecna hellish nightmare and they go back in time to fix it, maybe run into their younger selves, or around themselves, like the DS-9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations. It’d be a pretty sad knock-off plot device, and it’d be expensive for them to run an entire season like that.

Anyway, all I was saying that they’re not kids anymore. I think it was the recent announcement of Millie Bobby Brown’s marriage that really made me aware of how much time has passed. Season 1 first aired 8 years ago.

They’re not kids anymore. Eleven just got married. No way they can pass them off as younger now.

I mean, someone’s having a fun time… just not Snowball.

A vet once told us, no fish bones for cats, but chicken and anything bigger was OK. No chicken or fish bones for dogs, bigger than a chicken was OK. It’s about the size of the bones, and whether they can swallow them and get them stuck in their throats.

I trust the vet’s advice over some random internet image.

Harry looks thrilled. Never happier.

Nesting? TA also says the mouse was stockpiling seed the guy was leaving out for the birds.

See, I was going to say capybara don’t belong in this list; they seem almost as law-abiding as sloths.

I didn’t realize capybaras carried such latent hostility.

Yeah. Size matters a lot, but dogs’ big advantage is the pack. Voodoo lived in a time and place where dogs had lost that advantage, and it let him be king.

Almost unrelated, but this exchange suddenly reminded me of this:

When I was a kid, our neighbors had a simply massive, jet-black cat named “Voodoo” that would hang out laying on the top rail of the fence between our properties, waiting for dogs to come by, at which point he’d jump down and chase them off down the street. He’d come sauntering back a bit later and get back up on his fence.

I don’t doubt that many dogs could have made short work of him, but none in our neighborhood tried to. He was an impressive cat.

Like I said, not really relevant, but I hadn’t thought about Voodoo in years.