The Titanic Meeting of Two Old Gods
Posted on January 6, 2012 Posted by John Scalzi 29 Comments
Cthulhu and Zeus get to know each other a little better.
It went pretty well; the cat was the one who was shy and kept backing away from the rabbit, while the rabbit kept following him around the basement. Eventually the cat got into a high place and just watched the rabbit. Then the dog came down with her “Hey! What’s Happening?”-ness, and both the rabbit and cat retired to their respective corners. Just another day in the life of the Scalzi zoo.
The picture taken, incidentally with the camera on the Mac Air. It was the one available.
Our cats were always terrified of our rabbit. Rather sad for rabbit because he just wanted to play. He would hop up to them and they would bop him on the nose and run away in terror. The neighbor’s dog on the other hand.would have liked nothing more than some tasty, tasty rabbit and would have gotten some too if not for the fact my mom was quick with a broom.
My cat tried to bolt after a wild rabbit last week. He’s not an outside cat, he’s declawed and he panics after 2 paces out of the door. When he managed to squeeze through the opened door, he met with the 2 inches of snow.
Safe to say, the rabbit went on living oblivious to the danger that had lurked that day and my cat spent the rest of the day cowering on a dining room chair safely under the table.
Ah, cats!
Watch that dog around the rabbit. Rabbit is natural dog food on foot. My dog was on his way to eating my daughter’s rabbit when I found them. They were in the backyard unsupervised. Just FYI.
They also look like they’re doing the Groucho and Harpo Marx mirror bit. Daisy is their Margaret Dumont/Isis.
I know you are Agnostic, but don’t you think you should avoid invoking the names of the Elder Gods just to be safe?
Please do watch the dog.
One of our dogs just tried to bring half a bunny in the house this week. The volume of my wife’s response caused the dog to retreat outside for half an hour. Then she tried to enter with a smaller bit, and we sent her back outside. We had to perform entry inspections on all dogs for the rest of the evening.
Is that some kind of chameleon cat or is the rabbit the one changing to look like the cat?
Our rabbit tried to be friendly with out cats, too. Really friendly. I always wondered what cabbits would look like…
RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!!
Cabbits… short tails, long ears, long hind legs – Manx!
I’ll just leave this here…
http://www.simonscat.com/Films/Hop-It/
It’s not a compound until it has a zoo.
My 5 dogs get along just fine with the cat but when we open the rabbit cage they all gather round and stare with the occasional flinch when the rabbit lunges forward to viciously sniff one of them. The snake cage is also a source of amusement for the family when it tries to eat a wagging dog tail.
Pets are weird, I don’t even want to get started on the relationship between the goose and the turkey.
Zoo? I always preferred the term menagerie… But they ain’t my pets, so I suppose you call em as you like. Just so long as I am not misusing the term.
a lovely symmetry
And I thought our rabbit (Patches, RIP) was the odd one when she broke out of her cage, hopped right out of the bedroom and up to my mother’s cat, a cat that had at least eight pounds on her, and stuck her nose in the cat’s face, causing him to run away in terror.
Apparently, we’ve bred the macho out of felinus domesticus…
Or the cats know something we don’t.
My parents had a rabbit and a Basset hound. Basset hounds were bred to hunt rabbits with, but only to do the finding part, not the killing part. They’re also extremely lazy when they get older. So when we had them both in the yard, the dog would mostly sleep and the rabbit would hop around eating the crabgrass. But occasionally the dog would wake up, notice the rabbit, get all excited and run over to it, and then look back and forth between the rabbit and the humans (we never did this without one of us close by to supervise). If the rabbit moved, he would carefully follow it around, but after a while he would usually lose interest and fall asleep again.
We figured he knew he was supposed to find rabbits, and he expected the humans to do something after the rabbits were found, but he didn’t know what we were supposed to do.
Ahem. There’s a reason why bunnies have this…er…fertility reputation. Our Mini-Lop was the terror of the neighborhood cats and even of a few small dogs. But he always took off after anything else with fur with a certain lecherous look in his eye. He also found black pant legs fascinating. At least he didn’t go through the entire male bunny fertility rite….just the honking in a circle around the black pant legs (especially mine).
J R-W @10.10:
Your Mini-Lop sounds like a friendlier version of Greebo from Discworld.
We have two rabbits. The inlaws have a cocker spaniel. We went to visit the inlaws and took the rabbits. We were very careful when the bunnies were around the dog – for the dog’s sake. In a stand-up fight between the dog and my girl bunny, Boudica, I know who would win, and it wouldn’t be pretty. (She’s aptly named.)
@J R-W @10:10
My first bunny was a boy named Harvey. I finally had to stop wearing my fuzzy leopard-print slippers around him because he found them a little too…interesting.
We, too, had a cat/rabbit household in 1983. The kitten, Aja, was maybe six months old when Cerebus (like I said, it was 1983) joined the family. We had the rabbit out in the living room one evening when Aja wandered by, and before we could say “WTF?” Cerebus had raced across the room, knocked the poor kitten on her side, done his business and hopped off looking for a cigarette, leaving Aja staring at the mess on her flank with a look of “I AM NOT going to lick that off!” We cleaned her up, and kept Cerebus in his cage more consistently.
A few weeks later, a friend came to visit, and picked Cerebus up. Cerebus proceeded to unload his bladder all over our friend. Cerebus was given to a rabbit farm for breeding purposes shortly thereafter.
So, yeah, caution.
The Irony of the meeting is that other than shape they are exactly the same color.
Behold! The gods of adorability!
We’ve had a pet bunny (mascara) who terrorized our cat. While there are cats that will attack rabbits (my mothers old cat would attack ANYTHING with 4 legs or wings and usually manage to eat some of it), it makes sense that most cats would be nervous about a rodent that is perhaps 50 times the size of the mouse it is designed to eat?
Id be pretty timid around a hamburger that weighed 50 pounds:p
Now all you need is a goat named Baphomet…
good it was a larger cat. Long ago and far away (well, in Merriam, KS), our housemate decided she needed a pet because we had a whole menagerie of our own. She got a six-month-old Dutch bunny, male. The first introduction to our about 14-week-old girl kitten turned into a flank-rape. Three loving adults watched in open-mouthed horror as the rabbit ran up to her, sniffed her, tossed her down and started humping her flank. A moment or two later, he tossed himself on his side, looking like he needed a cigarette. The kitten had a look of ‘euuuuuuw” on her face, we snatched her up and cleaned her off. We never let the rabbit loose where he could get to the cat.
Kearney, I wonder what a cat would think about a pet capybara?
Way back when I had both a cat and a rabbit, they got along quite well. Occasionally the cat would try to groom the rabbit. The first time that happened was very funny… It’s a pity I didn’t have a camera handy, because poor Vorpal looked like a cartoon “nerd who’s just been kissed”, with fur on end and ears askew. Over the years he learned to put up with kitty grooming for maybe 30 seconds at a time….