As with shifting a food, cat litter changes should be done gradually.
Try adding a few handfuls each time you clean over the course of a week. Next time you have to clear out all the litter, do half old half new. If nothing indicating displeasure happens, change out the lot the time after that.
Did a bunch of research because our godson brought home some snails from school, wanting to keep them as pets. His gardening club had found them in and amongst their plants.
Random Snail Facts:
To start with, depending on the species of snail, apparently they can live 8 to 15 years. (Ours did not, but more on that in a bit.) Snails are hermaphroditic, both male and female. Most species still need to mate to produce eggs. A scant number are capable of self-reproduction.
A single snail can lay 200-400 eggs every season. This can cause drastic complications in your snail tank, if you do manage to keep conditions appropriate enough to cause a snail-splosion. We somehow managed to. Because of this, we discovered that snails will resort to a form of cannibalism if you cannot keep enough calcium available in the tank for all of them. Our small snails would climb onto our larger snails. At first we thought this was a form of social interaction, and some of it may have been. However, we started noticing “trails” in the larger snails shells…. left by the baby ones as they ate the grown snails’ shells to help form their own. We took 50-100 baby snails out of the tank every time we did a cleaning, and still ended up losing the older ones due to shell weakening and complications that came out of it. So, no matter how cute they seem, if your snails manage to breed, get as many of them out of your primary tank as you can.
Snails do like social interaction with other snails, so keeping more than one is a good idea. However, if you think you will be releasing your snails at some point, don’t mix local and exotic species.
Snails are harmless, and you can handle them without issue, as long as you do it gently and do not pick them up by the shell. Slide your finger under the snail’s body, or offer it food, and then pick up the food and the snail together. You should wash your hands before and after handling. Snails also enjoy baths. We used to bathe them (light stream of water to clean off the shells and body) every time we cleaned the tank, and it seemed to make them happy. Granted, gauging snail happiness is an odd sort of thing.
Care and Keeping of Snails:
Keep snails in a clear, well-ventilated aquarium. You definitely want a sturdy and secure lid, as snails are surprisingly strong. From our observations, they really like climbing things, so making the inside of the aquarium interesting is a good idea. They enjoy it, and were surprisingly interesting to watch.
Keep the aquarium itself in a safe place – avoid direct sunlight, and make sure they are not near any chemicals or direct heat.
Cover the bottom of the aquarium with something springy – peat moss, cocoa fibres, coir, etc… You want to keep it damp, but not wet.
Humidity inside the tank should be 60-70%. Keep a dish of water inside, and spray as needed. Clean the aquarium weekly, including the snails themselves. Post-bath snails were fun to watch, as they would suddenly become much more zippy. Do not use vinegar or detergents to clean out their area – stick with water and patience and elbow grease.
As far as food goes, snail diet is varied, and something you can experiment with. Our set were just garden snails, and they had different food preferences. Overall, go with green plant matter and a calcium source. Dandelions are actually a really good choice, as they are a green with a ton of calcium. Spinach is similar. Most of ours truly loved carrots, and dandelion greens always went before any other green matter. They also liked leeks. As far as calcium sources – fish bones work, as do egg shells, and so do any old snail shells that you might find in your garden or yard. You can also use baby milk powder, or straight bone-meal.
There are a number of ways in which cats show affection and trust, and not all of them are as immediately obvious as curling up into your lap and purring.
Blinking: If they feel threatened or uncomfortable, a cat will do its level best to keep its eyes open. Blinking, or half-closed eyes are a sign of trust.
Grooming: If a cat allows you to groom it, and even more if it grooms you, this is a sign of acceptance and trust. Cats use mutual grooming for stress relief and relationship building.
Head Rubbing: This is a combination affection and mark of ownership. Cats have scent glands on their faces, and when they rub their head against you, they are marking you as their own.
Stomach Display: This is one of the deepest signs of trust a cat can give. However, presenting the stomach does not necessarily mean asking for belly skritches. Depending on the cat, trying to do anything to the belly, even if presented, will provoke a defensive response, no matter how much they like you.
To begin with, before bringing a new cat home, you need to wander around your house and assess safety as you would for a toddler. There seems to be a consensus that you should not leave out anything you would not leave out and handy to a 2 year old. Keep in mind that there is not really an “out of reach” for a cat without putting it in a cabinet. With some cats I have known, that isn’t even enough, but it should suffice in most cases.
Keep all medication away from cats, especially OTC painkillers. Both aspirin and ibuprofen are toxic to them, and Tylenol contains acetaminophen, another cat-specific toxin.
Antifreeze is toxic to cats. Then again, antifreeze is toxic to most things that are not a car, so you’ve probably tucked that away somewhere safe already. Similar statement applies to cleaning products. Again, unless you lean towards green and non-chemical cleaning, they are fairly toxic.
Remove potentially dangerous houseplants – peonies, lillies, hyacinths, mistletoe, and evergreens.
Keep your toilet lids down. Kittens can drown trying to drink the water, and if you treat the water in the tank, adult cats can poison themselves doing the same.
If you keep cut flowers around, make sure all elements of the arrangements are non-toxic. A lot of ornamental plants are poisonous to both cats and people, but the cats may actually chew on them. (Lillies are a good example.)
Keep the flue to your fireplace closed. Cats are more than able to climb up a chimney, and between the soot, and the getting out (if you have an indoor cat) this can cause all sorts of complications.
Take care with ironing boards. They were not made stable enough to stay standing after being assaulted by a leaping cat.
Take precautions with electrical cords. Some cats will chew them.
Do not leave unattended candles. Cats are drawn to warmth, and could knock them over, or singe themselves, or worse.
Be careful with twine, string, ribbon, yarn, dental floss, etc…. Cats tongues are barbed, and long lengths of things can be involuntarily swallowed, as the design of both tongue and throat will just keep drawing the material down.
Name: Catnip
Latin: Nepeta Cataria
Other Common Names:
Family: Mint
Parts Used:
Vitamins/Minerals: Calcium
Used for: Can be used for easing menstruation, relieving colic, and to relax you into sleep. Also falls into the category of herbal pain relief, working by soothing and strengthening the nerves and muscles, rather than by deadening nerves. Also acts as a muscle relaxant and antispasmodic, and can assist with cramps and spasms. Good choice for herbal vinegars, due to the amount of calcium it contains. More commonly used for cats, to make them act somewhere between happy and a bit crazy.
Use in tandem with:
Directions & Warnings:
To start with – as little CORN and WHEAT as possible. Much much more necessary for cats than dogs, but as one of the articles I’ve read put it – “When was the last time you saw a cat or dog hunt a loaf of bread?”
Possible ingredient listings: wheat bran, wheat flour, wheat germ meal, wheat mill run, wheat shorts, middlings, wheat red dog, defatted wheat germ meal, corn bran, corn feed meal, cracked corn, ground corn, corn grits, corn flour, hominy feed, maltodextrins… etc…
(Other grains aren’t lovely either, so if you see: barley, grain sorghum, oats, or any kind of screenings, aspirated grain fractions….)
Generally, try to make sure grain is not in the top section of the list of components for what you are feeding your pet. Brewer’s rice is another ingredient to stay away from if possible. Applies for humans, too. This is the small broken grains left over after rice has been processed. No nutritional value, just empty calories. If curious for a lot more data, visit www.petsfortheenvironment.org.
This next bit is fairly disgusting. Stay away from “meat meal.” This means meat has been rendered and dried and than added into the food. That part doesn’t sound too awful. However, meat meal can contain both dead zoo animals AND the corpses of euthanized pets. For me, the concept of feeding my cats and dogs dead cats and dogs is rather enough. However, those corpses still contain amounts of the drugs used to euthanize the animals to begin with, which means the food will as well. Even short term testing has indicated that this is probably not a good idea, but over a lifetime the effects likely snowball. Other things that can be included in meat meal are restaurant grease and supermarket waste.
Due to my research over time into this matter, in a perfect world, I would make the food for them myself…. not having that kind of energy, we make sure that we know what all the ingredients are, what they mean, and why they are included.