Category: Bo

cats and dogs, living together

whbeebe1 Comment
From left to right, Beau, Danï and Ruby taking a nap

I have never seen anything on YouTube nor read anything on the web that matches our current conditions in this house with our two large dogs and six various cats. Everybody gets along with everybody else. Ruby, the Yellow Lab, has always been a companionable animal with every living creature she’s ever met, including not only our current clowder, but all the first generation cats in this house.

How do we make it all work? Through kindness and fairness. All living creatures understand those two fundamental acts. We are always kind to everyone, and we are fair whenever we do anything positive for the animals. What we do for one we try to do for all in some way. It’s like raising human children. We are kind to our animals and we play no favorites. No creature in this house feels the need to compete with the others for anything.

I wish the outside world were more like this, but as current events show it’s not.

last caturday in april 2022

whbeebe2 Comments

Two gingers lounging on one of the dog beds. The bed is big enough for one of the two dogs, one fourteen-year-old female Yellow Lab and the other a seven-year-old female Black Doodle. Big dogs. Yet the cats have discovered that they too can lounge about on the dog beds and the dogs won’t bother them. In this instance Beau is lying across the top, while Nicholas lies next to him across the bottom corner.

There are a number of observations in this small photograph.

  1. Nicholas, at 10 months, is as long as Beau at 6 1/2 years. I don’t know how much Nicholas weighs, but I’m sure it’s close to Beau. When Nicholas finally grows up, he’s going to be one big ginger, maybe the biggest of the three males.
  2. That orange ball in the lower left corner is one of Nicholas’ play toys. It was originally a dog toy, and the dogs still like to play with it. So now does Nicholas. He’ll bat it around the floor and chase after it. My wife has even told me she’s watched Nicholas lie on his back and hold the ball in his forelegs. I have yet to see that. I can’t wait.
  3. All the cats have discovered that the dog beds are great to lie on, and they’ll gather together in groups of up to three on one bed. I suppose if I had a hookah close by they’d fill it with catnip and use that too while lounging.

It’s never a dull moment around here.