Cats vs. Dogs

[hectorberlioz]

We always hear about amazing stories of dogs who saved their owners' life etc...well and fine, I like dogs too.

But I object to statements by people who say that cats are useless and boring.

Let me tell you about our cat Pippin.

One rainy day, my mom was riding her bike by the creek we swim at in summertime. Now this creek is about as wide as a two way highway, and about 3 feet deep in some areas. Not exactly something a cat would willingly jump into and swim across, but this scrawny kitten did just that; swam over to the side where my mom was.
On another occasion, he jumped from our treehouse fifteen feet down to the ground.

He was an amazing cat, I wish he was still around...


Cat and Dog stories welcome

[The last sane person]

My uncle's cat Lonnie saved me from a snake when I was a kid and wandering around the woods in their back yard. Not sure if it was poisonus, but it WAS about to bite me.

Lonnie liked to follow the kids around, she was our nanny cat, and she just leaped out on that thing with all four sets of claws going and killed it. I think it might have been a king snake, or something, cause it was big. But all I remember was being scared out of my wits then the cat going bonzai on the snake.

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by The last sane person

My uncle's cat Lonnie saved me from a snake when I was a kid and wandering around the woods in their back yard. Not sure if it was poisonus, but it WAS about to bite me.

Lonnie liked to follow the kids around, she was our nanny cat, and she just leaped out on that thing with all four sets of claws going and killed it. I think it might have been a king snake, or something, cause it was big. But all I remember was being scared out of my wits then the cat going bonzai on the snake.

*raises fists toward the sky* You hear this, Dog Lovers!! Eh?

Wow, thats awesome!

[Gwaimir Windgem]

Awesome cat story, sane.

I want a cat...shame pets aren't allowed on campus...

[The last sane person]

Yeah, lonnie is a cool kitty. Still around and as tubby as ever. And my cat peshe is a sweet old thing. 24 and she still waits for me by the door every day and sits on my chest every morning.

[hectorberlioz]

Don't you guys agree that cats are just better than dogs overall?

[The last sane person]

They are good in their own ways. As are dogs. Cats are the independant friends. They like you if they like you, and if they dont, no way you can change their minds.

Dogs...are like children that never grow up, they need you all the time. But they have their own loyalty to you, cats do, but in a different form, cats are loyal to you if you show loyalty first. Dogs just are loyal to whom ever feeds and plays with them and show leadership.

I have both and love both equally, if in different ways.

[hectorberlioz]

All the dogs we've had have been friendly to our cats. I don't know what it is...


Dogs are awesome too... , I agree...

[Spock]

Take no offense, but I just had to do this.

[The last sane person]

Well, I must say, I do dress my Pitbull up. But it's in very nice sweaters and whatnot. He has short short hair, and gets cold easily, poor guy. So I give him our old sweaters and amend them to fit him. He likes it.

[Lady Ravyn]

i got my kitty, rose, a year ago this month. she has such a funny personality... my brother and my boyfriend say that from sleeping with in my bed every night with me, she's begun to channel my personality lol she's happy and snuggly when i'm in a good mood, sleepy when i am, and grumpy and stand-offish when i'm in one of my "moods" lol it's weird how pets reflect their owners. my aunt always says "show me the owmner and i'll tell you what sort of personality their pet will be".
it's pretty much true in my experience.

[jellyfishannah]

From a Dog's Daily Diary:

8:00 a.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!
9:30 a.m. Oh, boy! A car ride! My favorite!
9:40 a.m. Oh, boy! A walk! My favorite!
10:30 a.m. Oh, boy! Getting rubbed and petted! My favorite!
11:30 a.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!
Noon Oh, boy! The kids! My favorite!
1:00 p.m. Oh, boy! The yard! My favorite!
4:00 p.m. Oh, boy! To the park! My favorite!
5:00 p.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!
5:30 p.m. Oh, boy! Pretty Mums! My favorite!
6:00 p.m. Oh, boy! Playing ball! My favorite!
6:30 a.m. Oh, boy! Watching TV with my master! My favorite!
8:30 p.m. Oh, boy! Sleeping in master's bed! My favorite!


From a CAT's Daily Diary:

Day 183 of My Captivity: My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while I am forced to eat dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of escape, and the mild scolding I get from ruining the occasional piece of furniture.
Tomorrow I may eat another houseplant. Today my attempt to kill my captors by weaving around their feet while they were walking almost succeeded; must try this at the top of the stairs. In an attempt to disgust and repulse these vile oppressors, I once again induced myself to vomit on their favorite chair, must try this on their bed.

Decapitated a mouse and brought them the headless body in an attempt to make them aware of what I am capable of, and to try to strike fear into their hearts. They only cooed and condescended about what a good little cat I was. Hmmm, not working according to plan.

There was some sort of gathering of their accomplices. I was placed in solitary confinement throughout the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell the food. More importantly, I overheard that my confinement was due to my power of "allergies." Must learn what this is and how to use it to my advantage.

I am convinced the other captives are flunkies and maybe snitches. The dog is routinely released and seems more than happy to return. He is obviously a half-wit. The bird, on the other hand, has got to be an informant, and speaks with them regularly. I am certain he reports my every move. Due to his current placement in the metal room, his safety is assured.

But I can wait, it is only a matter of time...

[Earniel]

Originally Posted by jellyfishannah

From a Dog's Daily Diary:

8:00 a.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!
9:30 a.m. Oh, boy! A car ride! My favorite!
9:40 a.m. Oh, boy! A walk! My favorite!
10:30 a.m. Oh, boy! Getting rubbed and petted! My favorite!
11:30 a.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!
Noon Oh, boy! The kids! My favorite!
1:00 p.m. Oh, boy! The yard! My favorite!
4:00 p.m. Oh, boy! To the park! My favorite!
5:00 p.m. Oh, boy! Dog food! My favorite!
5:30 p.m. Oh, boy! Pretty Mums! My favorite!
6:00 p.m. Oh, boy! Playing ball! My favorite!
6:30 a.m. Oh, boy! Watching TV with my master! My favorite!
8:30 p.m. Oh, boy! Sleeping in master's bed! My favorite!

Oh yes, those are great. The version of the dog dairy that I read before was a little different. That one went:

[...]
12.00 a.m. Oh, boy! The kids! My favorite!
1:00 p.m. Oh, boy! The yard! My favorite!
2:00 p.m. Oooh, bath. Bummer.
4:00 p.m. Oh, boy! To the park! My favorite![...]

[brownjenkins]

I had a cat some years back, Bones, who I kept from a litter one of our cats had. He was almost like a dog in disguise. Very playful and easy going. He use to follow along when I would go on walks in the woods and would even play fetch sometimes with little twigs or cat toys. Bones also loved water. He would jump in when you were taking a shower and even hopped in the tub on one occasion.

[Nurvingiel]

I love dogs and cats! My favourite cats are Russian blues and American shorthairs (ie. mutt cats). My favourite dogs are Springer Spaniels, English Bulldogs, and mutts.

My fiance and I want to have one cat and one dog when we have our own place. Right now we live in an appartment building that doesn't allow pets. A dog wouldn't be happy here anyway, and probably neither would a cat. It's a small studio appartment.

[Finrod Felagund]

I have 2 cats, sisters...both have their quirks

The one, Nina, loves earplugs. it is her favourite to, and the only one she spends any real time with. But she's constantly losing them under the fridge or couch, and when she does, she'll come find someone and meow until they get the earlugs for her.

The other, Dora, LOVES spinach. Like, she goes ballistic when you get it out, she reacts like a cat would to catnip...so weird.

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by brownjenkins

I had a cat some years back, Bones, who I kept from a litter one of our cats had. He was almost like a dog in disguise. Very playful and easy going. He use to follow along when I would go on walks in the woods and would even play fetch sometimes with little twigs or cat toys. Bones also loved water. He would jump in when you were taking a shower and even hopped in the tub on one occasion.

See? Here is evidence people, that cats can be just as daring as dogs. Wow, BJ, that was one cool cat

If you read the first post, we had a cat named Pippin, and we found him -actually he found us, swimming across a very large creek. He was the scrawniest thing you'd ever seen. But he turned out to be a real adventurer. One time he jumped fifteen feet down from our treehouse.

[The Gaffer]

Any Eddie Izzard fans out there? He had some great routines about cats and dogs:

Cats have a scam going – you buy the food, they eat the food, they go away; that’s the deal.

Pavlov's Dog experiments: Day 1: Rang bell, dog ate food. Very excited. Day 2: Rang bell louder dog even more food. Have become welsh. Day 3: Like speaking in Welsh so have decided to continue in that way, rang bell, dog ate so much that he explodes. Win Nobel dog prize at Crufts.

But he never published his cat results did he? Oh yes they were hushed up. Day 1: Rang bell, cat ****ed off. Day 2: Rang bell cat went and answered door. Day 3: Rang bell, cat said he eaten earlier. Cheeky bugger. Day 4: Went to ring bell but cat had stolen batteries! Final day, day 5: rang bell with new batteries but cat put his paw on bell so it made a 'thunk' noise. Then cat rang his own bell! I... ate food.

And cats leap up walls! Six foot walls, they just go… "Fwang" (mimes cat jumping) Lands perfectly, and turn… turn… and back flip and forward flip, and dismount! They always land perfectly, they never do that sort of wobbly-gymnast … (mimes wobbling) You never see cats on a wall having a problem, do you? You never see a cat going, (mimes tentative walk) “****ing ‘ell..! I’m not sure about this…” and a cat on the ground, going, “Easy, Ginger! Walk it out!”

[Gwaimir Windgem]

I am reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, and came across this bit about cats which was too insanely awesome and to awesomely insane not to share. It's a work of art, so I reproduce it in full.

Background: the premise of the book is that Western culture has always been shaped by two archetypal cultural forces, the Apollonian (associated with maleness, order, civilization, reason, light, sky, ascendence, linearity, etc.) and the Dionysian (associated with femaleness, nature, chaos, fertility, darkness, earth, circularity, etc.). Egypt was the only society where the two co-existed in harmony, and ever since then they've been struggling for dominance, the one over the other. Egypt's balance between them is seen in, among things, the Egyptian worship of cats:

Originally Posted by Camille Paglia

One of the most misunderstood features of Egyptian life was the veneration of cats, whose mummified bodies have been found by the thousands. My theory is that the cat was the model for Egypt's unique synthesis of [Apollonian and Dionysian] principles. The modern cat, the last animal domesticated by man, descends from Felis lybica, a North African wildcat. Cats are prowlers, uncanny creatures of the night. Cruelty and play are one for them. They live by and for fear, practicing being scared or spooking humans by sudden rushings and ambushes. Cats dwell in the occult, that is, the “hidden.” In the Middle Ages, they were hunted and killed for their association with witches. Unfair? But the cat really is in league with chthonian nature, Christianity's mortal enemy. The black cat of Halloween is the lingering shadow of archaic night. Sleeping up to twenty of every twenty-four hours, cats reconstruct and inhabit the primitive night-world. The cat is telepathic – or at least thinks that it is. Many people are unnerved by its cool stare. Compared to dogs, slavishly eager to please, cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their “evil” look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.
Thus the cat is an adept of chthonian mysteries. But it has a hieratic duality. It is eye-intense. The cat fuses the Gorgon eye of appetite to the detached Apollonian eye of contemplation. The cat values invisibility, comically imagining itself undetectable as it slouches across a lawn. But it also fashionably loves to see and be seen; it is a spectator of life's drama, amused, condescending. It is a narcissist, always adjusting its appearance. When it is disheveled, its spirits fall. Cats have a sense of pictorial composition: they station themselves symmetrically on chairs, rugs, even a sheet of paper on the floor. Cats adhere to an Apollonian metric of mathematical space. Haughty, solitary, precise, they are arbiters of elegance – that principle I find natively Egyptian.
Cats are poseurs. They have a sense of persona – and become visibly embarrassed when reality punctures their dignity. Apes are more human but less beautiful: they posture but never pose. Hunkering, chattering, chest-beating, buttock-baring, apes are bumptious vulgarians lurching up the evolutionary road. The cat's sophisticated personae are masks of an advanced theatricality. Priest and god of its own cult, the cat follows a code of ritual purity, cleansing itself religiously. It makes pagan sacrifices to itself and may share its ceremonies with the elect. The day of a cat-owner often begins with the discovery of a neat pile of mole guts or mashed mouse limbs on the porch – Darwinian mementos. The cat is the least Christian inhabitant of the average home.
In Egypt the cat; in Greece the horse. The Greeks did not care for cats. They admired the horses and used it constantly in art and metaphor. The horse is an athlete, proud but serviceable. It accepts citizenship in a public system. The cat is a lay unto itself. It has never lost its despotic air of Oriental luxury and indolence. It was too feminine for the male-loving Greeks. I spoke of Egypt's invention of femininity, an aesthetic of social practice removed from nature's brutal female machinery. Aristocratic Egyptian women's costume, an exquisite tunic if transparent plated linens, must be called slinky, a word we still use for formfitting evening gowns. Slinking is the nocturnal stealth of cats. The Egyptians admired sleekness, in greyhounds, jackals, and hawks. Sleekness is smooth Apollonian contour. But slinkiness is the sinuous craft of daemonic darkness, which the cat carries into day.
Cats have secret thoughts, a divided consciousness. No other animal is capable of ambivalence, those ambiguous cross-currents of feeling, as when a purring cat simultaneously buries its teeth warningly in one's arm. The inner drama of a lounging cat is telegraphed by its ears, which swerve round toward a distant rustle as its eye rests with false adoration on ours, and secondly by its tail, which flicks menacingly even while the cat dozes. Sometimes the cat pretends to have no relation to its own tail, which it schizophrenically attacks. The twitching, thumping tail is the chthonian barometer of the cat's Apollonian world. It is the serpent in the garden, bumping and grinding with malice aforethought. The cat's ambivalent duality is dramatized in erratic mood-swings, abrupt leaps from torpor to mania, by which it checks our presumption: “Come no closer. I can never be known.”
The cat is a time-traveller from ancient Egypt. It returns whenever sorcery or style is in vogue. In the Decadent aestheticism of Poe and Baudelaire, the cat regains its sphinxlike prestige and magnitude. With its taste for ritual and bloody spectacle, conspiracy and exhibitionism, the cat is pure pagan pomp. Uniting nocturnal primitivism to Apollonian elegance of line, it became the living paradigm of Egyptian sensibility. The cat, fixing its swift predatory energy in poses of Apollonian stasis, was the first to enact the frozen moment of perceptual stillness that is high art.

[katya]

I prefer cats also (and after that bit gwai posted who could argue?).

I am also very similar in temperament to my kitty, Dmitri. We are two peas in a pod . We like sleep, treats, are easily distracted, and are clingy while shunning unsolicited physical contact. And we freak out at loud things especially vacuums!

Kitty has a facebook profile if you'd like to see pictures. (if you want to add me just send a pm)