I'm buying 2 kittens this week

[MonkeeMan]

Our cat is the biggest pain in the arse in the history of arses. Life would be worse without him.

[vexvelour]

I didn't read through the responses, but as a longtime cat owner, here is my advice.

1. If you like your furniture or carpet, you're going to have to get them declawed. Do this only if you're sure they will become inside cats for life, because if they become outside cats they will have no way to defend themselves in the wild. Declawing is nowhere near as inhumane as it was a few years ago- they do it with a laser now and recovery time is very short. My 2nd cat had this done and he was fine as soon as the meds wore off.

2. Invest in decent food. You don't have to spend $30 on a bag of food, but make sure it's not crap, either. One of my cats got a horrible UTI from crappy food I bought him and it ended up costing me an assload more to get that fixed than it would to just buy good food. Also, if you get them started on wet food they will expect that from then on and will not eat dry food.

3. As for toys, they love balls and stuff, but it'll get lost in approximately 5 seconds under the fridge or stove or couch. My cats love the stupidest things- mostly caps from bottles and socks and stuff. Catnip filled stuff is always a good idea. The best toy in my eyes is the stick with a long string and a feather or other toy attached at the end. My cats love this toy and drop it on my face when I'm sleeping because they want to play with it.

Those are the only really important things I can think of. The automatic litter boxes are nice, except don't get the littlersweep one at PetsMart because it doesn't work. Trust me on this one. Be aware also that if the box isn't clean they'll poop elsewhere- on the carpet, and my one cat used to poop in the shower if the box was too dirty. Kitties are cute but are hell on earth (mine were) to deal with because they don't listen at all. It's a excersize in patience, for sure.

Good luck and I hope my advice helps! Enjoy your kitties and post pics when you get them!

[wdeadwyler]

I would reccomend not declawing. I had the greatest cat ever. He was energetic, cute, clever, and just awesome. We declawed him when we moved and he just got fat and depressed. We had to put him to sleep at 4 because he had massive liver damage (not sure what caused this)

My point is he was never the same after we declawed him.