I can has new book title?

Don’t hurt cats. Also, read HTML below. (Get coffee first.)

what, you couldn’t have photoshopped in a Jonahgut for kitty? he’s just too svelte.

That cat looks like it’s so freaked out it prolly pissed itself!

LOL!

Most liberals seem to like cats, which is stupid because they do not do what you want them to, unlike dogs. Most dog people are patriots, however.

I’m an animal control officer. Just FYI. And I hate Gary Ruppert.

The Lolcats thing is apparently lost on you, Gavin. The picture shows a cat being tortureed by an ugly troglodyte. That’s not = teh funny. Of course kitty does not want that. For it to work, it has to be something harmless and cute associated with Jonah. Get it? Not actual animal abuse.

‘Sokay, Gavin. It’s utterly lost on me too…

mikey

Black’n’white cats, as a rule, are very cool and should not be tainted by association with Teh Mouse That Scribbled.

Besides, I thought Doughy Pantload finished his Magnum O’ Opiate already, so it’s not much of a joke anyhow.

Jeff, it looks to me like the cat has been “snared” with one of those keepaway poles, which looks a lot worse than it hurts (unless you count the serious injury to the cat’s self-esteem, of course). If I were trying to corral a scared stray, I’d definitely recommend that kind of “humane capture” implement. I spent ten years assisting at beginner-level dog training classes, handled all kinds of potentially dangerous canines (pit bulls, fear-biting German Shepherds, boxers, even a wolf mix who incidentally was one of the loveliest animals I’ve ever met) and the only time I’ve ever been bitten was by my own feral-born eight-month-old KITTEN. Hurt like a bastard, I had to wear a sling for a week, and take antibiotics for a month…

Most liberals seem to like cats, which is stupid because they do not do what you want them to, unlike dogs. Most dog people are patriots, however.

Spoken like a true authoritarian toady, Mr. Ruppert. And I call bullshit: people who actually live with dogs know that “do[ing] what you want them to” is extremely conditional, because the average dog is smarter and less craven than the average wingnut. Although since the latest scientific theory is that dogs domesticated themselves — that they developed a symbiotic relationship with our protohuman ancestors because a wolf with no sense of shame can make a good living off human wastefulness* — they do have certain hereditary inclinations in common with the common or garden Internet Troll…

*True theory. Thus the universal dog motto: YOU GONNA FINISH THAT?

Anne Laurie, you’ve been on fire lately. Will you be my new hero?

they do have certain hereditary inclinations in common with the common or garden Internet Troll…

Butt-scooting across the carpet? Check. Snacking on those tasty tasty Kitty Roca treats from the litter box? Check. Ecstatically rolling in decaying fish, maggotty roadkill, and any other reeking foulness that presents itself? Check.

It is sort of alarming, all the similarities.

Most dog people are patriots

What about hamster owners?

I own and manage a large flock of microbes. Keep ’em in the laundry.

I’ve got ’em trained, now. They do a short synchronized swimming act, and a pretty funny vaudeville routine.

But when they come out after the intermission and do “The Aristocrats”? Man, that KILLS….

mikey

Wow, according to amazon, “Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Velociraptors to Wittgenstein” is scheduled to drop in December. I honestly wasn’t sure my grandchildren would live to see that day.

jeff, I’ve put feral, downtown-restaurant cats (you should have seen their father) into carriers using gloves. Well, I started with gloves. But I learn slow, I did it twice.

By comparison, this photo struck me as an archetype of making the best of a bad situation. I mean it looks rough, but compared to my experience–well it reminds me that the next time I’ll probably call animal control and pay any fee.

If it’s a matter of the state of the art, you’ll at least have piqued my curiosity. Although I’m currently on a dander R&R from pootie duty, I’ve learned that I’m thesort of person who should just expect that there is a cat out there with my name on it.

Agreed with everybody but the trolling assbiters; cat’s are frickin mean. I’ll take dealing with an angry dog any day over wrangling a pissed off cat. Of course Gary likes dogs. He appreciates an animal that pisses itself when dominated.

What about hamster owners?

Somebody call Rush Limpaws…his hamsters are loose again.

As I read this, I and my sister and curled up, Hallmark-card style, on the second chair in the study. Cat’s are mean? Quoth who, m’dears?

Oh, okay, those wild ones are. I once knew a woman with a chunk of meat the size of a plum taken out of her calf, courtesy of a feral cat. But to be fair, it’s the bastards that let their kitties have kitties then dump same, that are responsible.

If I were in charge, I’d let the kitties have the house and toss the bastards out in the bush. That’d teach ’em: having to fight it out with the wildlife for their dinner. And we’ve got some dangerous wildlife.

A thousand pardons, Dearest Qetesh. Allow me to clarify: Cats are mean when provoked. Half a lifetime ago, I worked in a couple of different animal hospitals. Some kitties simply do not transition well from their comfy homes to small metal cages. We had elbow-length leather gloves for handling these poor distressed creatures, which protection was never even considered necessary for wrasslin your average belligerent canine.

Cats are, I’m sorry, mean.

I say this, having participated in several … um, interesting … sessions of fixing stray toms who insisted on peeing on our farm equipment. When they mark their territory, it stinks, and it rusts. And if it’s your truck, your tractor, or (God forbid), your Ranchero, it drives you to radical solutions.

So, if you find yourself in this situation, what you do is, you take a burlap sack, and you cut a hole in the far end of it about 1″ in diameter. Then, you grab the nearest pee-happy tomcat you can find, and you put him in the sack. Your goal is to get his tail out the 1″ hole. This is not as easy as it sounds. I suspect this is because of a cat’s natural wariness of having his tail, and not coincidentally his family jewels, grabbed by people who have shoved him into a burlap sack.

Should you get the tail out the hole (feel free to relate this Homeric feat to the doctor who will be applying the stitches to your forearms), you then proceed to excise the physical bits that have been the cause of the stench and the rust on your mechanical investments. One swipe of the X-Acto knife, a shpritz of Betadine, and you’re set.

Oh, and ask someone else to open the bag. The cats tend to be somewhat out of sorts after the operation.

“Oh, and ask someone else to open the bag. The cats tend to be somewhat out of sorts after the operation.’

So it’s someone else’s job to let the cat out of the bag? Yah, I’d be unsorted myself if de-nutted without anesthetic.

Stickler, fortunately for you, both I and my sister are (a) female, (b) desexed humanely with an anaesthetic, and (c) pampered to a ridiculous extent and kept indoors.

I tend to get very aggressive about people who dump cats, or mistreat animals in general. Far too many people treat pets as some kind of cheap, disposable plastic toy, and when things turn out otherwise, they dump ’em.

If I had my way, you’d be sending the cats off to the vet to be desexed in anaesthetised comfort, then given a comfortable home with plenty of soft cushions and mice to chase, while the people who dump them would get the burlap sack and the sudden removal of their nadgers.

Another technique for dealing with temperamental cats is cat-wrapping. James Herriot mentioned it in his Cat Stories (yes, I do have cat books, and cat prints, and cat figurines, and…but I digress). You take the snarling little beast, catch it in a blanket, and then quickly wrap the animal up firmly, but not in a way which is excessively binding, leaving only the cat-part of interest. I became an expert in cat-wrapping when I had to give a couple of my problem cats doses of antibiotics.

One of them died a year ago when he lost a fight with a dog for the first time in his life. He was a real terror, but around people he was the sweetest cat ever.

The other is now a magnificent old lady of twenty years, and still active. Hasn’t been sick in years, which pleases me for her sake as well as mine!

Stickler was describing what one does with feral cats on the farm. Having been raised on a farm I can assure the city dwellers what he described was

wtf? anyway…

what he described was quite humane.

I also used to live on a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town and we regularly found animals that people had simply discarded. They would drive by late at night and just get rid of them. We had a very sick black and white dog that just showed up one day. He was half blind and had arthritis so bad he could barely walk. He died within a day or two but I guess it was just too much trouble for his owners to care for him. Sad, very sad.

I prefer dogs.

But stickler: Try a vet next time. Less trauma for you and the cat.

I prefer dolphins, because they have really cute blowholes…

As the caretaker for 2 geriatric dogs, I agree that dogs are more like wingnuts.

One dog hoards all the cookies he’s given, and taunts the other dog with his wealth.

The other dog, due to his illness, allows his shit to fall wherever it may. He’s deaf so he can ignore the reaction of his housemates when they encounter his dropped shit. He’s photogenic, too, so he smiles and beams fetchingly at you while you’re busy scraping his shit off your shoe.

Cats? Not so much.

Wouldn’t you be mean if somebody stuffed your ass in a bag and chopped off your nads? I guess you’re supposed to just lay there and think of England.

Why has this thread degenerated into cats v. dogs, when it should really be about Jonah Goldberg, Foam Book colorist extraordinaire?

Fight the real enemy, people!!!

Wouldn’t you be mean if somebody stuffed your ass in a bag and chopped off your nads? I guess you’re supposed to just lay there and think of England.

Cat in Bag: “England England England England England England EnglOOWWWW, MY NADS!”

Why has this thread degenerated into cats v. dogs, when it should really be about Jonah Goldberg, Foam Book colorist extraordinaire?

Jonah in Bag: “England England England England England England (snip) Ha ha, libruls! You can’t get those! Mommy already has ’em in a jar in the cupboard! She says it keeps me from thinking the bad thoughts.”

Wouldn’t you be mean if somebody stuffed your ass in a bag and chopped off your nads? I guess you’re supposed to just lay there and think of England.

On the other hand it might be a relief not to have to pay attention to the old nads. On to the next Marie Jon’ atrocity.

Not to step too deep into the dogs vs. cats fray, but I have yet to find a dog who has tried to explode my brain by staring at me.

I was only relating experiences from my youth. In the years after the feral tomcat infestation, we generally used the services of the local vet (who lived 45 miles away and charged us $50 for the procedure).

My refusal to participate in any more DIY cat-fixings also left my father little choice but to go with the professional. Hard to do the cat-in-the-bag procedure by yourself, I guess.

The feral tomcat infestation came in a year when there were very few coyotes out and about. Once their numbers recovered in the mid-’80s, the frequency of stray cats making it to our farm dropped considerably.

stickler, I commend you on your efforts to reduce the stray cat population on the farm!

But you have to admit, that process would make anybody mean, except perhaps the increasing number of sexually deviant Republicans.

But you have to admit, that process would make anybody mean, except perhaps the increasing number of sexually deviant Republicans.

I firmly believe that cats are mean to start with, and our procedure just brought things to a higher pitch for a few minutes. I mean, seriously, do you really trust a cat enough to turn your back on him?

Though they’re not as shifty and devious as Republicans, I’ll grant you that.

Cat’s will defend themselves. Snaring by the neck is the stupidest way of dealing with a feral cat I can think of. And wrong. Sorry, though! I’m sure it’s funny.

Well, this cat is clearly not being snared by the neck, but rather the torso, just under the forelegs. Whenever I pick up my cat, I pick them up by the torso (although I don’t dangle them vertically either, I confess).

Jumping Judas Iscariot, people! If you’re going to pick up a cat, and you don’t have the handy device pictured in this post, then for God’s sake, pick the damned animal up by the neck!

You grab him by the back of the neck, and he goes limp. More or less. Why? Because that’s how mama cats pick up baby cats.

How many stitches do you want on your forearms? Criminy sakes. This isn’t rocket science, people.

stickler:

You got it almost right, except one is not supposed to do that with adult cats. But in a pinch, or just to hold them still, the skin at the back of the neck near the shoulder blades (cats got shoulder blades?) works real good. Just don’t carry them around like that if they are full grown.

You got it almost right, except one is not supposed to do that with adult cats.

Let’s say, for whatever reason, you’re in a confined space with a feral tomcat. And you need to get both yourself and the tom out of that space. What do you do? Herd him out the door? Good luck with that.

Grab the bastard by the back of the neck, suffer the punishment his claws will inflict, ignore the blood gushing from your forearms, and shuttle your sorry self and the God-forsaken cat out the door. It’s not a good option, it’s the best of a series of bad options.

You grab him by the back of the neck, and he goes limp. More or less. Why? Because that’s how mama cats pick up baby cats.

It’s a popular theory and mostly it works pretty well. But you should remember that cats, especially young ones, can rotate almost 180 degrees around inside their own skins. I got bitten, deep into the fleshy part of my thumb, when my feral little “friend” spun her head around on her collarbone like Linda Blair and chomped down.

Whenever possible, I prefer the cat-wrapping option, using my secret effete urban weapon — PANTYHOSE. Get a pair of ladytights, preferably the cheap thick crappy drugstore variety (used and/or torn is fine). Stuff the cat into the panty portion & tie the waistband around its neck. Cat will promptly stick all eighteen claws out in at least four different directions, and will snag itself into the nylon sufficiently that it can’t put up much more resistance. If it keeps struggling, you have two long stretchy “ties” (the hose-legs) to help you isolate whatever needs isolating. You can poke a hypodermic through the nylon fabric, if you need to give an insulin shot or hydration syringe; you can clip a small hole over the relevant area if you need to put ointment on a wound; and by the time the cat is thoroughly wrapped, it’s done enough to exercise its first amendment rights that you can usually manage to massage the pill down its throat, get the drops in its eyes, or swab the ointment into its ears without getting bitten.