Litter box, litter, SCOOPER to get the shit out of the litter, food (find out from previous owner what it's been eating, what brand they've been using. It's okay to change brands, but if many brands are pretty interchangeable and if a cat is already used to something it can help with the transition).
Food and water dishes: the set up we have, which is good because it is low maintenance, is a dispenser that can dispense a lot of food and water at a time. It stores the kitty biscuits in a container with a lid on top and a hole on the bottom which lets the biscuits fall out into a trough. As the cat eats the biscuits, more biscuits fall down. Cats are generally good at eating only when hungry, especially if it's the crunchy dry cat biscuits and not YUMMY YUMMY TASTY HAM I AM A STARVING AND NEVER FOODLED KITTEN PLEASE GIMME HAM. same thing with water -- the kind i have uses a regular 1.5 L water bottle and i just have to refill that and whenever the water level goes down in the trough, more water comes out of the bottle. It's very effective.
laser pointer! yesh!
brush, if the cat needs it -- and some cats like it. scratchy thing if it has claws.
a kitty bed is nice -- doesn't have to be anything expensive, it could even just be an old towel that you decide will be his/hers. But my cats are equally likely to use my pillow as a kitty bed -- Csillag will even use my pillow case as a sheet, burrowing into the pillow case, turning around, and then falling asleep on the pillow with only her head sticking out of the pillow case.
New kitty: generally, you should take him to the vet within 48 hours of acquiring him.
kitty treats are good. don't give them too many, but i find one anti-hairball treat a day does keep the vomiting down, at least somewhat. also, with the vomiting, i noticed that with certain brands of wet food they were much more likely to throw it up immediately (although they liked it very much and wolf it down), whereas other brands they seemed not to throw up so much. it's all trial and error, but the trend we noticed was that the very cheapest stuff, the stuff that was so cheap it was hard to believe they could affordably put meat in it at all, tended to make them throw up more.
you definitely want a lap cat. neither of our cats started out as lapcats, but about 7 years in they suddenly turned into lapcats. i guess they mellowed with age.
as for avoiding doing it wrong: don't pull their tails. they don't like it.
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Food and water dishes: the set up we have, which is good because it is low maintenance, is a dispenser that can dispense a lot of food and water at a time. It stores the kitty biscuits in a container with a lid on top and a hole on the bottom which lets the biscuits fall out into a trough. As the cat eats the biscuits, more biscuits fall down. Cats are generally good at eating only when hungry, especially if it's the crunchy dry cat biscuits and not YUMMY YUMMY TASTY HAM I AM A STARVING AND NEVER FOODLED KITTEN PLEASE GIMME HAM. same thing with water -- the kind i have uses a regular 1.5 L water bottle and i just have to refill that and whenever the water level goes down in the trough, more water comes out of the bottle. It's very effective.
laser pointer! yesh!
brush, if the cat needs it -- and some cats like it. scratchy thing if it has claws.
a kitty bed is nice -- doesn't have to be anything expensive, it could even just be an old towel that you decide will be his/hers. But my cats are equally likely to use my pillow as a kitty bed -- Csillag will even use my pillow case as a sheet, burrowing into the pillow case, turning around, and then falling asleep on the pillow with only her head sticking out of the pillow case.
New kitty: generally, you should take him to the vet within 48 hours of acquiring him.
kitty treats are good. don't give them too many, but i find one anti-hairball treat a day does keep the vomiting down, at least somewhat. also, with the vomiting, i noticed that with certain brands of wet food they were much more likely to throw it up immediately (although they liked it very much and wolf it down), whereas other brands they seemed not to throw up so much. it's all trial and error, but the trend we noticed was that the very cheapest stuff, the stuff that was so cheap it was hard to believe they could affordably put meat in it at all, tended to make them throw up more.
you definitely want a lap cat. neither of our cats started out as lapcats, but about 7 years in they suddenly turned into lapcats. i guess they mellowed with age.
as for avoiding doing it wrong: don't pull their tails. they don't like it.