Animal Jokes

My law partner was presenting a no-fault divorce case to an Ohio domestic-relations court. The couple involved had no children, but they did have a dog, of whom both were very fond.

My partner stated that both parties agreed to share whatever medical expenses might be necessary for the care of the animal. They also agreed that the wife would have custody, but that the husband would be allowed visitation rights.

The judge, looking somewhat startled, peered down at the husband and asked, "Is this true?"

The husband replied, "Yes, Your Honor."

"Well," intoned the judge, with a trace of a smile on his face, "you should know that there is nothing this court can do for you if the dog refuses to see you."

I was at a yard sale one day and saw a box marked “Electronic cat and dog call—guaranteed to work.” I looked inside and was amused to see an electric can opener.

I bought my sons a pet rabbit after they promised they would take care of it. As expected, I ended up with the responsibility. Exasperated, one evening I said, "How many times do you think that rabbit would have died if I hadn't looked after it?"

"Once," my 12-year-old son replied.

Dave's parrot was always using bad language, so he asked the vet how he could stop it. "Every time the bird swears, put it in the freezer for 15 seconds," advised the vet.

The next time the parrot uttered an expletive, Dave did as the vet said. Then, feeling guilty, Dave opened the freezer.

Shivering, the parrot came out saying, "I'm sorry for all the bad language I've been using." Dave was astounded at the sudden change. Then the parrot said, "By the way, what did the chicken do?"

A French poodle and a collie were walking down the street. The poodle turned to the collie and complained, “My life is such a mess. My owner is mean, my girlfriend is having an affair with a German shepherd and I’m as nervous as a cat.”

“Why don’t you go see a psychiatrist?” asked the collie.

“I can’t,” replied the poodle. “I’m not allowed on the couch.”

My niece bought her five-year-old daughter, Kayleigh, a hamster. One day he escaped from his cage. The family turned the house upside down and finally found him. Several weeks later, while Kayleigh was at school, he escaped from his cage again. My niece searched frantically but never found the critter. Hoping to make the loss less painful for Kayleigh, my niece took the cage out of her room.

When Kayleigh came home from school that afternoon, she climbed into her mother’s lap. “We’ve got a serious problem,” she announced. “Not only is my hamster gone again, but this time he took the cage.”

 

 

My father-in-law had prostate surgery. We brought him to the hospital at 7:30 a.m., and he was operated on at eight. We were amazed when the hospital called at noon to tell us he could go home. Two months later our beagle, Bo, also had prostate surgery. When I brought him in, I asked the veterinarian what time I should pick him up. The vet told me Bo would remain overnight. “Overnight?” I said. “My father-in-law came home the same day.” The vet looked at me and said, “Bo’s not on Medicare.”

One of the highlights of the freshman biology class at New Mexico Highlands University was the monthly feeding of a caged rattlesnake kept in the laboratory. One time, the entire class gathered around the cage and, in complete silence, watched as the feeding took place.

"I'm jealous of the snake," the instructor said. "I never get the class's undivided attention like this."

A student answered matter-of-factly, "You would if you could swallow a mouse."

Sounds of crashing and banging in the middle of the night sent me and my husband out to our garage. There we spotted three raccoons eating out of the cat dish. We shooed them away and went back to bed.

Later that week we were driving home and I noticed three fat raccoons ambling down the road. "Do you think those are the same ones we chased off?" I asked.

"Hard to tell," said my husband. "They were wearing masks."

The vet prescribed daily tablets for our geriatric cat, Tigger, and after several battles my husband devised a way to give her the medication. It involved wrapping Tigger in a towel, trapping her between his knees, forcing her mouth open and depositing the pill on the back of her tongue.

David was proud of his resourcefulness until one hectic session when he lost control of both cat and medicine. Tigger leaped out of his grasp, paused to inspect the tablet—which had rolled across the floor—and then ate it.

A hypnotist was visiting the aquarium during feeding time. "You know," the hypnotist said to the man feeding the fierce shark, "I could hypnotize that shark."

"You're crazy! He'll rip you limb from limb," the feeder said, laughing. "But, hey, if you're so brave, be my guest."

The hypnotist jumped in, swam to the shark and stared it in the eye for a full minute. The animal paused, blinked, and then tore into him. The bleeding man slowly made his way out of the tank.

"I thought you could hypnotize him," sneered the feeder.

"I did," the hypnotist said, holding his arm. "Now he thinks he's an alligator."

Each morning at 5:30, I take my Lhasa Apso, Maxwell, for a walk. He has the bad habit of picking up bits of paper or other trash along the way. When he does, I command him to “drop it,” and he usually complies.

One morning, though, he absolutely refused to drop a piece of litter. So I told him to “sit” and then approached him to see what his treasure was. It was a $10 bill.

“Nice dog. What’s its name?” I asked my friend’s 10-year-old son.

“Bob,” he said.

“And your cat?”

“Bob.”

“How do you keep them straight?”

“Well one is Bob Cat and the other is Bob Barker,” the boy answered.

“Tell him your rabbit’s name,” his father suggested.

The kid smiled and said, “Dennis Hopper.”

Our cat, Figaro, comes home between 10 or 11 at night to eat. If he's late, I turn on the carport light and call him until he appears.

One day my daughter was explaining to a friend where we live, and her friend said, "Is that anywhere near the house where the woman stands on her steps late at night and sings opera?"

 

 

We visited our newly married daughter, who was preparing her first Thanksgiving dinner. I noticed the turkey thawing in the kitchen sink with a dish drainer inverted over the bird. I asked why a drainer covered the turkey.

Our daughter turned to my wife and said, “Mom, you always did it that way.” “Yes,” my wife replied, “but you don’t have a cat!”

Squirrels had overrun three churches in town. After much prayer, the elders of the first church determined that the animals were predestined to be there. Who were they to interfere with God's will? they reasoned. Soon, the squirrels multiplied.

The elders of the second church, deciding they could not harm any of God's creatures, humanely trapped the squirrels and set them free outside of town. Three days later, the squirrels were back.

It was only the third church that succeeded in keeping the pests away. The elders baptized the squirrels and registered them as members of the church. Now they only see them on Christmas and Easter.

My brother adopted a snake named Slinky, whose most disagreeable trait was eating live mice. Once I was pressed into going to the pet store to buy Slinky's dinner.

The worst part of this wasn't choosing the juiciest-looking creatures or turning down the clerk who wanted to sell me vitamins to ensure their longevity. The hardest part was carrying the poor things out in a box bearing the words "Thank you for giving me a home."

 

 

A friend of mine is a deputy with the sheriff’s department canine division. One evening, the deputy was dispatched to the scene of a possible burglary, where he discovered the back door of a building ajar. He let the dog out of his patrol car and commanded it to enter and seek.

Jumping from the back seat, the dog headed for the building. After lunging through the doorway, the dog froze and backed out. My friend was puzzled until he investigated further. Then he noticed the sign on the building: “Veterinarian’s Office.”

My sister-in-law, a truck driver, had decided to get a dog for protection. As she inspected a likely candidate, the trainer told her, "He doesn't like men."

Perfect, my sister-in-law thought, and took the dog.

Then one day she was approached by two men in a parking lot, and she watched to see how her canine bodyguard would react. Soon it became clear that the trainer wasn't kidding. As the men got closer, the dog ran under the nearest car.

Lost in the woods, a hiker spends two days wandering around with no food. Finally, he spots a bald eagle, hits the bird with a big rock and eats it. A park ranger stumbles on the scene and arrests the man for killing an endangered species. In court, the hiker explains that he was on the edge of starvation and had no choice.

“Considering the circumstances, I find you not guilty,” says the judge. “But I have to ask—what did the eagle taste like?”

“Well, Your Honor,” the hiker replies, “it tasted like a cross between a whooping crane and a spotted owl.”

 

 

One day while we were doing yard work, my nine-year-old daughter found a baby snake, and I encouraged her to catch it and put it in a jar. Later she found a huge bullfrog and got another jar to put it in.

After dark I told her she would have to set them free. With the frog in one hand and the snake in the other, she started down the porch steps. Suddenly she screamed wildly, dropped both the snake and the frog, and ran into the house.

"What happened?" I asked, my heart thumping.

"Did you see that?" she replied. "That moth almost got me."

An adorable little girl walked into my pet shop and asked, “Excuse me, do you have any rabbits here?”

“I do,” I answered, and leaning down to her eye level I asked, “Did you want a white rabbit or would you rather have a soft, fuzzy black rabbit?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think my python really cares.”

Snake 1: Are we poisonous?
Snake 2: I don't know. Why?
Snake 1: I just bit my lip.

My friend’s husband, Ray, is a state trooper and enjoys sharing the excuses people use when stopped for speeding. One day, however, the tables were turned. Ray maintains an aquarium of exotic fish, and a prized specimen had threatened to turn belly up. The off-duty officer called a pet store, and they advised him to immediately purchase a special additive that would correct the water’s pH.

Ray and his wife jumped into the car and rushed to the store. A state trooper signaled them to pull over. “Go ahead,” Ray’s wife said. “Tell him you’ve got a sick fish!”

As I was walking through a variety store, I stopped at the pet department to look at some parakeets. In one cage a green bird lay on his back, one foot hooked oddly into the cage wire.

I was about to alert the saleswoman to the bird's plight when I noticed a sign taped to the cage: "No, I am not sick. No, I am not dead. No, my leg is not stuck in the cage. I just like to sleep this way."

I worked at a boarding kennel where people leave their dogs and cats while on vacation. One morning I had taken a cat out of his cage, and after playing with him and replenishing his food and water, I put him back in. A few minutes later, I was surprised to see the feline at my feet, since the cage doors lock automatically when they’re shut. I couldn’t figure out how the cat escaped, until I bent down to pick him up and spied his nametag: “Houdini.”

From the Danvers, Ill., Shopper:

"Ferret, likes kids, nice pet, but chewed the guinea pig's ear off. Also, partially 2deaf guinea pig."

 

 

When my daughter and I caught only one perch on our fishing trip—not enough for even a modest lunch—we decided to feed it to her two cats. She put our catch in their dish and watched as the two pampered pets sniffed at the fish but refused to eat it. Thinking quickly, my daughter then picked up the dish, walked over to the electric can opener, ran it for a few seconds, then put the fish back down. The cats dug right in.      

At the end of a visit to Amsterdam, a friend borrowed an old suitcase from his hosts to carry home his souvenirs. At the airport, however, a customs officer subjected our friend’s luggage to a thorough search and even sent for a drug-sniffing dog. Sure enough, the dog entered the area, headed straight for the borrowed bag and went into a frenzy. The customs officer now intensified his search, but ultimately he found nothing.

After arriving home, the young man immediately phoned his hosts and told them how puzzled he’d been by the dog’s behavior.

“Perhaps,” the owner of the suitcase said, “it was because that’s the bag our cat usually sleeps in.”

 

 

My father’s secretary was visibly distraught one morning when she arrived at the office and explained that her children’s parrot had escaped from his cage and flown out an open window. Of all the dangers the tame bird would face outdoors alone, she seemed most concerned about what would happen if the bird started talking. Confused, my father asked what the parrot could say. “Well,” she explained, “he mostly says, ‘Here, kitty, kitty.’ ”

My son is an avid listener to our city’s police frequency, and he leaves the scanner on all the time. One morning while making his bed, I heard the dispatcher say, “Car 34, there is a five-foot boa constrictor in a front yard. The resident wants a policeman to come and remove it.”

There was a long pause, then some static. Slowly, a voice said, “We can’t get the car started.”

 

 

In good weather, my friend Mark always let his yellow-naped Amazon parrot, Nicky, sit on the balcony of his tenth-floor apartment. One morning, Nicky flew away, much to Mark’s dismay. He searched and called for the bird, with no luck.

The next day when Mark returned from work, the phone rang. “Is this Mark?” The caller asked. “You’re going to think this is crazy, but there’s a bird outside on my balcony saying, ‘Hello, this is Mark.’ Then it recites this phone number and says, ‘I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you will leave a message at the tone, I will call you back.’”

Nicky’s cage had been kept in the same room as Mark’s answering machine.

Living in a household with eight indoor cats requires buying large amounts of kitty litter, which I usually get in 25-pound bags—100 pounds at a time. When I was going to be out of town for a week, I decided to go to the supermarket to stock up. As my husband and I both pushed shopping carts, each loaded with five large bags of litter, a man looked at our purchases and queried, “Bengal or Siberian?”

In the Moreno Valley (Calif.) Recycler:

"Homing pigeons free to good home. Must live far, far away."

 

 

According to the Internet: The inscription on the metal bands used by the U. S. Department of the Interior to tag migratory birds has been changed. The bands used to bear the address of the Washington Biological Survey, abbreviated as “Wash. Biol. Surv.”—until the agency received the following letter from an unhappy camper: “Dear Sirs: While camping last week, I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and want to tell you it tasted horrible.”

The bands are now marked “Fish & Wildlife Service.”

A snake slithers into a bar and the bartender says, “Sorry, buddy. I can’t serve you.”

“Why not?” the snake asks.

“Because you can’t hold your liquor.”

 

 

 

 

Once while riding the bus to work, I noticed a man at a stop enjoying a cup of coffee. As we approached the stop, he finished drinking and set the cup on the ground. This negligence surprised me, since it seemed to be a good ceramic cup.

Days later I saw the same man again drinking his coffee at the bus stop. Once again, he placed the cup on the grass before boarding. When the bus pulled away, I looked back in time to see a dog carefully carrying the cup in his mouth as he headed for home.

 

 

I was editing classified ads for a small-town newspaper when a man called to place an ad. "It should read," he said, "‘Free to good home. Golden retriever. Will eat anything, loves children.’"

I always scoffed when my sister insisted that our three dogs are computer literate. Then one day when I was signing on to AOL, I noticed that when the “welcome” voice came on, the dogs immediately settled down. Later, when they heard the “good-bye” sign-off, all three dogs rushed to the door expecting to be walked.

The drive-up window at the bank where I’m a teller has an outside drawer to accept customer transactions. A woman once drove up with her dog in the front passenger seat, and the pet eagerly jumped over onto the driver’s lap when the car reached my window. He looked excited to see me.

“Your dog is so friendly!” I said to the owner.

“He thinks he’s at McDonald’s,” she replied.

On a recent trip to the post office, I took a few minutes to read the notices posted on the public bulletin board in the lobby. One in particular caught my eye.

It read “Lost in post-office parking lot, small boa constrictor, family pet, will not attack. Reward.”

Below the notice someone had written, in what appeared to be very shaky handwriting: “Please, would you mind posting another notice when you find your boa? Thank you.”

 

 

When a rattlesnake got loose in the second-floor hall of the science building at my university, it created quite a furor. Fortunately, one of the professors was an expert on snakes. An agitated student ran to fetch him, urging him to come quickly, as a dangerous snake was loose, terrorizing everyone in the building.

The professor leisurely strolled out into the hall, examined the snake from head to tail, and calmly returned to his office. “It’s not one of mine,” he said, and closed the door.

 

 

One night while I was cat-sitting my daughter’s indoor feline, it escaped outside. When it failed to return the following morning, I found the beast clinging to a branch about 30 feet up in a spindly tree. Unable to lure it down, I called the fire department. “We don’t do that anymore,” the woman dispatcher said. When I persisted, she was polite but firm. “The cat will come down when it gets hungry enough.” “How do you know that?” I asked. “Have you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree?” she said. Two hours later the cat was back, looking for breakfast.

At a workshop on dog temperament, the instructor noted that a test for a canine’s disposition was for an owner to fall down and act hurt. A dog with poor temperament would try to bite the person, whereas a good dog would lick his owner’s face or show concern.

Once, while eating pizza in the living room, I decided to try out this theory on my two dogs. I stood up, clutched my heart, let out a scream and collapsed on the floor.

The dogs looked at me, glanced at each other and raced to the coffee table for my pizza.

 

 

I like hunting fossils, a hobby that isn’t exactly my wife’s favorite. On one excursion, I found the petrified bones of a squirrel-like mammal. When I brought them home and told my wife what they were, she squelched my excitement.

“I’ve heard of many a squirrel bringing a nut home,” she remarked, “but this is the first time I’ve heard of a nut bringing a squirrel home.”

A favorite story among color-film processors concerns the negative of a poodle which a woman sent to a photo-finishing lab. When the print was made, the dog came out looking green. Figuring that there must have been a mistake in the color balance, a problem which plagues color processors, the lab tried again and again, and finally got the dog to come out a kind of improbable tan.

The woman who sent in the negative was furious when she got the picture of the tan poodle, which, she informed the lab, she had dyed green.

A client recently brought her two cats to my husband's veterinary clinic for their annual checkup. One was a small-framed, round tiger-striped tabby, while the other was a long, sleek black cat. She watched closely as I put each on the scale. "They weigh about the same," I told her. "That proves it!" she exclaimed. "Black does make you look slimmer. And stripes make you look fat."    

I'm a police officer and occasionally park my cruiser in residential areas to watch for speeders. One Sunday morning I was staked out in a driveway, when I saw a large dog trot up to my car. He stopped and sat just out of arm's reach. No matter how much I tried to coax him to come for a pat on the head, he refused to budge. After a while I decided to move to another location. I pulled out of the driveway, looked back and learned the reason for the dog's stubbornness. He quickly picked up the newspaper I had been parked on and dutifully ran back to his master.