My Cat Loves Me

[Alive]

Our cat is really appreciating this raw paleo diet!
My daughter just came in to say he is refusing to eat his canned food now he knows there is raw fish / liver / high meat in the house.
She has just given him more highish meat (~5 days at cool room temperature) and he loved it. He would never eat canned food more than a half day old, so this shows that cooked vs raw food breakdown is totally different.
As an experiment I sprinkled some of the meat with a broad spectrum probiotic powder, which has accelerated its ageing, and he loves this too.
He is a fussy meat expert, so if he wants to eat it then I am happy to eat it too!

[svrn]

You can make high meat at room tempurature?

also, my bosses dog loves my raw meat. Whenever I eat he begs me so hard that its hard to refuse him.

He also always tries to get to my food in my bookbag.

He recently got to some cheese in my backpack and ate the whole block.

[Dorothy]

My little doggie is being so cute today. I took out a marrow bone for us to eat but there were too many little bits of bone for us so I gave it to one of my little ones. That was early this morning. He has sat next to it all day, growling at the other dog, "burying" it by pushing air onto it with his nose and refusing to go or do anything else but yet hasn't even licked it! Such a silly puppy.

[boxcarguy07]

Cute hearing about these RAF fed pets! My dog gets INSANE whenever we give her a bone. Anyone that comes even close to her will get ferociously growled at, and she will definitely bite you if you try to take it away from her. Which becomes problematic when she's gotten every little last bit of fat and meat off the bone and now wants to eat the bone itself (which she will attempt to do, scrape of tooth by scrape of tooth) and we need to take it from her. She's normally not like that at all.

[Dorothy]

I'm definitely alpha. I went up and took it from him and walked him out to go pee pee because he wouldn't leave it. I've had lots of fosters that started off like your dog - but it didn't last long. It really isn't good to let them be in control of a food like that.

The especially cute part of it is that the bone is way too big for the little guy. He can't even put it in his mouth. I'm trying to figure how long to let him sit and guard it. I mean, everyone should have a little something to call their own!   Eventually I should probably give it to the chickens. That marrow really shouldn't go to waste and my dog might get bed sores! hee hee.

[boxcarguy07]

how do you recommend changing her? my gf went to take the last bone we gave her away and the dog bit her hand really hard (she's a tiny min-pin/chihuahua mix so it's not like a bite is that bad, physically at least). We got it away from her, and she was on edge for a bit, it took about 1/2 hour for her to become "normal" again. It was almost as if chemicals were slowly draining from her brain.

[Dorothy]

Hmmm How to establish dominance is a big subject that is a bit too much to go into here, but there is this dude on tv named Cesar Milan - The Dog Whisperer. One day hubbie is watching tv and tells me there's someone on saying all the same stuff I always do. He has a website and I can get his videos at my library and his books. If you are capable of doing what he says - it works - totally. He calls it dog psychology. It's what I've always known about dogs from watching them and talking with them. He does a real nice job of teaching too. His television program was on the National Geographic channel.

Living with a dog that bites is real bad - no matter what size. Chihuahuas bite more people than any other breed if my memory serves me. If your chi bites someone else it still is your responsibility and besides, living with a dog that is running the show is simply not fun and not good for the dog. Proper pack dynamics with the humans at the top of the pack makes for a happy pack.

If you can't find anything of Cesar's on-line I can research it for you. I think he has an entire on-line course.

One of the most important things is that all the humans be in agreement and on the same page working together. You can't have one person saying/doing one thing and the other person not. It's gotta be a joint effort.

Let me know if you can find the Dog Whisperer stuff.

[Dorothy]

I threw the bone out the chickens and I'm about a million times more scared of those 11 chickens than I am of any dog! They attacked that thing in a way that was scary. I swear, chickens are much more carnivorous than dogs or cats.

[boxcarguy07]

oh I'm definitely familiar with cesar milan. Lena (the dog) is the best behaved (and one of the smartest) dog I've ever met, until she gets a bone. She doesn't act like that with any other food, or at any other time. She is so good that we do not use a leash on her in public, she stays right with us and is always very good. When she gets a bone, it's like she's a completely different animal. I'll look in more detail at cesar's online stuff

[boxcarguy07]

sorry for kind of derailing the thread. Miker, any pics of your cat?

[Alive]

Our cat is scared of the chickens, they rush inside at any opportunity to eat his food, dead flies, and generally poop all over the place - new house rule is no chickens inside without nappies : ) maybe some of those face masks would work as chicken nappies!

Here is Eric the Cat with my daughter Fern - Eric is around 18~20 years old, and in his youth caught a lot of baby rabbits. He was taken away from this house when the previous owners moved out, and then a couple of weeks after we moved in he turned up having walked 10km to get home. For many years he thought he was the boss and would bite our ankles as we walked past, but now he is old he is happy to be at the bottom of the pecking order:

[Dorothy]

oh I'm definitely familiar with cesar milan. Lena (the dog) is the best behaved (and one of the smartest) dog I've ever met, until she gets a bone. She doesn't act like that with any other food, or at any other time. She is so good that we do not use a leash on her in public, she stays right with us and is always very good. When she gets a bone, it's like she's a completely different animal. I'll look in more detail at cesar's online stuff

You have to own the bone. The alpha shares the food, says who gets what. If your dog is owning that bone - she is alpha or thinks she is or should be.

No dog gets to touch any food unless I say it's ok. If a dog even starts to get possessive I go and stand over the food/bone. I send out the vibe. It's mine. Don't you dare touch this, or let go of it now because I want it. I've dealt with very food aggressive foster dogs. One would go out of his mind around raw liver. I would do the same thing with him but then have to correct him as well - do the Cesar bite with the hand thing and turn him over to prove that I was alpha even when it came to liver. He was very sick and deranged when he came. So if your dog is already a great dog in every other situation - it shouldn't be hard. Own that bone!   

[Dorothy]

What a sweet picture!

The feral cats that have tamed me outside I have to now feed on top of "their" potting bench or the chickens will attack them for the cat food. I'm always afraid for the chickens not because the cat will attack them - but because the chickens may figure out how to get up there and attack the cat and then the cats might figure out that they really are not subordinate - or don't need to be.