Do your pets have any strange habits that are potentially dangerous?

My dog leaves the stove on.really bad habit

@lucillelucillelucille He’s just trying to cremate the meatloaf.
@TheOnlyNeffie I had two golden retrievers that would run full steam into my legs and then set on my feet. The male would also jump at my face and deliver major bumps with his nose. They had been abandoned as young dogs, and just had to have full body contact. I lost them a few years ago to old age. I miss the contact.

I don’t know whether it is a strange habit as it is a natural dog instinct, but my dog will pick up anything that ever was food outside off the ground and eat it. This has resulted in problems with vets. None of my training attempts have worked—he just swallows faster.

Milo has learned how to open the door that leads into the garage. I have to make sure the garage door is shut before I close up shop for the night.

Frank jumps from the kitchen floor straight up to the top of the fridge.

He also wrestles with a 90lb Golden Retriever, wraps his front legs around the Goldie’s neck and licks his ears.

My new, just turned one, bluepoint siamese/ragdoll mix has transistioned from an indoors only to indoor/outdoor guy on my secluded property.

He is very good about staying near the house and is fascinated with all the local wildlife, deer, birds, turkeys, squirrels etc.

Both the new cats have adapted to a coming in around 10–11 p.m without fail whch is good, BUT…‘Gizzi’ is fascinated with the resident mama raccoon that has brought her babies around for 2 years running now.

This year there are 3 kits and she comes to my garage every evening hoping to find some cat food.

The last few nights I have opened the door to see ‘Gizzi’ on the cat tree on the garage landing surrounded by mama coon and her brood, so far so good, but I am not too thrilled with the situation.

Mama coon is pretty mellow and her babies are very sweet and shy, but, I am wise enough to know that IF she felt he was a threat in anyway to the babies she might become aggressive.

When I shoo off the gang he runs after them full of curiosity.

Raccoons and cats usually blend well but, there is always a chance for a problem.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

@Coloma Do you have all the cats vacinated for rabies? Big problem around here with raccoons.

@Adirondackwannabe

Oh yes, they are current on everything and on frontline, mostly for ticks, no flea issues much at my elevation.

I have never had a problem with a cat/raccoon confrontation in 18 years in the mountains but…aware that anything could happen.

My kitchen table has the decorative bars that act as a jungle gym for my kitty. He loves to play on them, but it’s definitely not safe. He also likes to chase his tail on things that are high up or unstable. Silly kitty!

@Coloma I had a skunk dog confrontation quite a few years ago. The skunk walked into their pen, in the middle of the day, and it went downhill from there. Pew.

The bad kitty.

@jjmah love him!

In one of my old photobucket accounts, I have a few pictures of him wrestling and licking my ex-gf’s Chow/Lab mix. I was going to post, but, I no longer have to password for it. :(

Aww, I hate it when that happens. Biggest downside to digital photos… they seem to be so much more easily lost than a hard copy.

My turtle only sings Ethyl Merman songs.

My little doggy…tiny actually, likes to go out into the garden in the middle of the night to bark at things unseen. I worry because we have had badgers and foxes in the garden. That’s why I always make a very loud hissing sound when I open the door to let her out. I suppose I think I am going to scare the bogey animals out of the area. With a silly loud hiss. I’m mad. :)

@DarlingRhadamanthus

lol..I always clap my hands really lodly to scare off anything lurking in my garage.

Now, of course, an easy solution would be to just shut the garage door…but…with the door up not only so the cats have access to the kitty door on the inside, but I also have a perfect view of the goose corral in the event that something is marauding around the geezers barn.

Also, the floodlight at the edge if the garage illuminates a huge area at night til bedtime.

As long as everyone stays within the ‘circle of light’ the night evils stay away, well..except the raccoons, they are fearless! lol

@Coloma…LOL .. The badgers are fearless, too and about the size of a Labrador! LOL

Sometimes herons get into the garden and try to eat my baby birds. That really upsets me. I remember once getting so upset I ran out with a steel mixing bowl and a wooden spoon, making such a racket, banging on that bowl to try to scare the heron away. As the bird flew away, I stood there, watching him fly only to come back to eye level and see my neighbor across the way looking at me like I had lost my marbles!

I protect my animals. Even if I do look crazy to my neighbors.

my boy cat, Frasier, eats plastic all the time… he wakes me in the middle of the night when he pulls it out of the garbage or off my desk (i can’t leave bags around, or clothing that is in plastic). he also used to lick my hair. just be careful with where you leave things… i don’t think you can do anything about him eating your hair, they eat their own, i wouldn’t worry.

Frasier also tends to lick photographs, i don’t know if this is dangerous but it’s certainly produces an annoying sounds.

Sasha (in my avatar) climbs up my kitchen stools, around the counter, sink, drying rack, shelves, refrigerator/stove, up to the really high cabinets and i always worry she’ll hurt herself coming down.

@DarlingRhadamanthus

Haha..oh yeah, been there!

Once the deer ate all my beautiful mornng glory vines that were about 12 feet tall and climbing up the side of the house.

I went out to see nothing left except the very top few feet they couldn’t reach, and they would rear up like horses and literally paw the birdfeeders til they flipped out all the sunflower seed.

I ran maniacally up the hill barefoot in the weeds screaming at them, I swear if ever I could have killed something with my bare hands. lol

When my daughter who is now 22 was about 5, she once exclaimed to guests at a dinner party that had commented on how lucky we were to have deer in the yard, that ’ my mommy only says really bad words when the deer eat her flowers!’ hahaha

Sometimes nature is out of control!

Note: Okay..catching myself going off topic…sorry, I’m done rambling now. ;-)

@TheOnlyNeffie fascinating cats you have, especially pulling your hair out of your head to eat it. I think he lurve you.

My Jillycat likes to fish plastic things and crumpled up paper out of the trash and skitter them about the house, so if I do throw a plastic bag in the trash I tie it in knots so she can’t get inside and suffocated. She probably does it partly because her “toybox” is a small metal wastebasket filled with cat toys. Maybe she thinks they are all “toyboxes.”

My [now greatly missed] Jacky cat was foolhardy. Climbing up trees and jumping on roofs of houses and afraid to come back down. Once he was fascinated with a large flying insect while standing on a 2-inch wide bit of fencing that was very near a wall and after reaching for it several times he jumped to catch the bug [even though he knew better] and fell down between the fence and the wall, fracturing his leg. When I took him to the vet, the vet who brought him back out after treatment said I had a “very aggressive cat” and I was thoroughly offended. He thought Jacky might hurt me but Jacky was the most loving cat I have ever had. He was just willful and fearfully independent. And finally he ate something poisonous.

@TheOnlyNeffie your question made me laugh so much! Your cats sound adorable… I have two troublesome kittles too. One likes bags. Any bag – plastic, handbag, toiletry bag – she gets in it. This isn’t a massive problem in itself except that my other cat likes to sit on the bag once she’s in it. He was our first cat so I think—although they get on okay now – that it’s still a bit of jealousy coming through.
Also, Ned (the one who sits on bags) can’t jump to save his life. If I leave a window open upstairs, he will try to jump out. He succeeded once and sprained his leg. He’s the only cat I’ve ever known who can’t land on his feet…
So in answer to your question – I don’t think there’s much you can do. Just keep your eye on plastic and tie your hair up or use a hair net!
P.S. – A really cute habit Ned has is he has this 5 foot green snake toy that he carries around with him. You can hear him coming because you can hear the snake dragging across the carpet. So cute!!

@MissCupid

‘Ned’ lol great name!

Just tie your hair up & put the them used condoms down the toilet :-/
As for the coffee they need something to keep them alert!! :-/

My kitten has a bad habit of chewing on electrical wires/cables for electronics, etc. I have been able to wane her off from doing this however. She also has a strange habit of taking certain items and “hiding” them in different places. I had to lift up my couch and loveseat to find my cell phone, cans of snuff, deodorant and other small items under them. I’m guessing she keeps “patting” at certain items with her paws until she pushes them to where she can’t get at them anymore but I’ve caught her reaching under the couch several times like she was trying to grab at something.

My dog eats plastic and rubber bands, which come out in his droppings. He also has a terrible habit of plopping himself down right under my feet, behind me. He’s going to end up killing us both.

He got his paw broken a couple of month ago. We aren’t sure exactly how it happened, but he walks right under everyone’s feet, so he frequently gets stepped on or tripped over.

He also jumps on the wooden fence separating our yard from the next door neighbors. There is a giant shepherd dog living there who has literally chewed off several of the slats over time and if he ever got through, he would kill my terrier instantly. I had to put in an extra gate in the back yard to keep my dog from that side of the yard.

My youngest dog wants to play with the semi-wild cats next door.
She is going to learn a very harsh lesson of of these days.

@Coloma….....That was a GREAT story!! LOL

@scooby: no condoms in the toilet!!! bad news

@Coloma my other kittie is called Phoebe :)

This is a really old thread, but just had to mention that my cat, Onslow, likes to eat dryer lint! I discovered this one day when I took the clothes out of the dryer, and a puff of lint went floating through the air. Onslow ran over to it, and I wondered what he was planning to do with it. He ate it! From then on, every time I am getting clothes out of the dryer, he is right there begging for a piece of lint.

Of course, this is the same cat that seems to get off on choking himself. He lays on the seat of a kitchen chair and deliberately hangs his neck over the decorative metal rail under the table until he chokes.

@Skaggfacemutt You resurrected this for me too. I have 2 newer cats I adopted in the last 2 years and they both have a habit of chewing on my zebra grasses which are very tough and sharp. I am just waiting for one of them to get a giant blade of razor grass stuck in their throat. :-/