More than one cat on the china cabinet almost always leads to a fight. When Floki sees Puck up there he cries at me to help him up. Usually, I say no because I know what will happen but I helped him up there this time and he was good.
The next time he was not so good. Stay tuned.
Our cat Puck has been peeing on the floor for the past several weeks now in addition to the pooping on the floor that has been going on for a couple of years. Regular readers know that he developed a bladder infection that started the problem but after getting better, the peeing continued.
Our living room is now a sea of pee pads.
The vet put Puck on Prozac a couple of weeks ago but getting him to take it has been hard. I don’t want to add to his stress by shoving it down his throat so I put it in his food. Unfortunately, he eats only half of his food, or less, when there is a crushed up pill in it. It is actually only a half of a very small pill so it surprises me that he even notices it. Putting it in tuna helps but giving cats tuna every day is not healthy.
Tuesday evening I noticed a couple of half-dollar size spots of pee on the floor and knew Puck’s bladder issue had returned. We made an appointment for the vet this morning but I have to be at work so my wife will be taking him in. Hopefully, if we get his bladder problem resolved he will start using the box again.
Floki has always been fascinated by the shower but I am sure he would like it less with the water turned on.
This is from a couple of years ago but Frankie and Chris are still relentless about wanting to go outside.
Chris and Frankie have both been increasingly annoying lately in their attempts to get one of us to let them outside. Frankie is the vocal one. He will make lots of noise while sitting and staring at the door. Chris is the sneaky one. Every time I go outside I check to make sure there is no cat around and then make a quick dash out the door. More often than you could imagine, before I get a chance to close the door, Chris is already outside.
At least I don’t have to worry too much about Chris running off and often I will let him stay out for a few minutes before I bring him in. He mostly just eats grass or lies on the driveway. If I leave him out too long he will start to wander off and then I know it is time to bring him…
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A few weeks ago The Island Cats’ blog had a review and giveaway of some Petmate products designed by Jackson Galaxy, the star of the Animal Planet show, “My Cat From Hell.”
To my surprise, we were lucky enough to win. I got to choose between the “Comfy Clamshell Bed” and “The Vault Marinator,” which is used to freshen up catnip toys. I thought the clamshell bed would be a great addition to our house so I chose that.
It was waiting at the door when I got home from work the other day The box was way bigger than expected, which was fine because . . . well, we have cats.
Once I opened the box and took out the clamshell bed, the cats were torn between investigating the bed and the empty box.
The bed seems to be of a high quality and the fabric is very soft. Chris especially likes it, as you can see from the video.
A pull of the strings easily turns it into a clamshell.
The bad thing about that is there is only room for one.
That means someone has to wait, whether they want to not.
Floki and Chris were the most interested but Chris was the first to use it for what it was meant for, to lie in. Of course, he had to make some biscuits before doing that.
Floki was more interested in the strings.
I didn’t know this at the time but there is a pocket to put the strings to keep them from becoming toys, possibly dangerous toys.
I ended up putting the bed in its open position on our coffee table. Frankie, Floki and Puck mostly ignore it but Chris loves it. I see him on it often. He is on it as I write this.
Meanwhile, in the cats’ room . . .
Sometimes Frankie just wants some alone time but Chris doesn’t know what that means.
The last time I mentioned anything about the stray mom cat and her two kittens that have been coming to my house was June 18 (see here). After that, we didn’t see them much. Over the next week or so we saw the mom twice, three times at most. Each time she as without her kittens. That caused us to worry about what might have happened to them.
I believe the last time I saw the mother cat was June 25 when I took the picture above and the video below. She seemed a bit despondent and was not as friendly toward me as in the past. She seemed nervous by my presence which was a far cry from a week earlier when she was rubbing up against me.
Rose and I thought someone might have captured her kittens but not her. That would explain her behavior. We didn’t know who would have caught them. The guy at the TNVR place had scheduled to come out and set traps that weekend but cancelled until the next weekend. He never showed up the following weekend and we never heard from him again.
I set up an email alert for Petfinder just in case the Siamese kittens ended up at a shelter for adoption. At least I would know what happened to them.
Not too long after my encounter with mom cat, Rose spotted one of the kittens outside the cats’ room. It was the shy one with the lighter face.
He was walking from the neighbors house to the back of our house and he was alone. The mom and other kitten were nowhere in sight. I quickly opened a can of food and put it outside but he never showed up to eat it.
Since then I continued to put dry food and water out for the cats. Sometimes I would wake up or get home from work and the food would still be there. Other times it would be gone. It seemed to be eaten more at night than during the day which made Rose think it was being eaten by a racoon. I thought it was possible but unlikely since I have not seen a racoon in the two years since we lived here.
Then one morning I went outside to take the trash out. Once I got outside I saw who had been eating he cat food. It was a possum, or technically an opossum. Now I have to wonder if the possum is the only animal eating the food I put out or is one or more cats eating it too?
I started putting less out but I don’t want to stop completely until I know none of the cats are coming around anymore. And if they are not, what the heck happened to them?
As some of you know, Puck developed a bladder issue a couple of weeks ago and started peeing at random places throughout our house. He has poopd outside the box, on and off, for over a year but he settled in on pooping in front of the litter box which was easy to deal with. Now he is pooping all over the house too.
My wife wanted to put him on Prozac a week ago but I hate the idea of giving a long-term medication to any our cats. I was pretty certain that what started as a physical problem had now morphed into a mental problem and I wanted to try every possible solution I could think of before resorting to drugs.
I mentioned a few things I tried in previous posts, like buying another litter box and putting it here, there and everywhere around the house. We bought a water fountain so he would drink more water. We bought a refill for our Feliway plug-in. I bought a calming collar. We sprayed areas with orange essential oil. I used oxy cleaner on the pee spots. I put him in the box when it looked like he had to go. I’m sure there were a few more things that I can’t remember but you get the idea.
Last week I noticed Puck put his front paw in one of the litter boxes and then run away from it like he stepped n the Lake of Fire. I then saw him squat to poop and I picked him up and put him in the box. He quickly pooped and then jumped out so quick that some of the poop came flying out of the box.
I then thought maybe he suddenly had an issue with the litter so I decided to buy something different. I tried World’s Bes Cat litter several months ago but our cats rarely used it, if ever. This time I bought Blue Buffalo Naturally Fresh Cat Litter. It is made from walnuts and it seemed like a great idea for litter so I bought a bag and put it in the middle litter box. If it was our brand of litter that was an issue, Puck would have another option.
After a week of zero usage, I had to throw it out and replace it with our normal brand.
We saw some progress with Puck this last week. A couple of times he went more than a day without pooping or peeing outside the box and then he would do both.
Rose wanted to bring him back to the vet to make sure his bladder was no longer the problem. If it wasn’t, that would open the door to a Prozac prescription. Since I had done everything I could think of, I could not argue with her. I did say that if he returned to litter box use, I wanted to reduce his dosage and then take hm off of it to see if he continued to be good.
I made an appointment for Puck at the vet for 8:00 Saturday morning. We were packing that morning for an overnight trip to Anna Maria Island for my birthday. Rose wanted to use her girly, designer suitcase because it is pretty and because it has two sides, one for her and one for me.
I packed my side that morning while Rose was getting ready. I talked to her about how Puck was better this last week than the week before and he may be on the road to recovery. A few minutes later he jumped on the bed and started exploring the suitcase. Then he squatted on Rose’s side of the suitcase and started peeing. I immediately pushed him off but now the lining of the suitcase was wet with pee. He couldn’t pee on my side where I could have just washed the top layer of clothes. Rose was very upset because now she had to throw away her good piece of luggage and buy another.
Waiting for trash day
I took out the other suitcase which is a perfect claw sharpener.
After bringing Rose’s suitcase outside I brought the cat carrier inside. Of course, Chris had to get inside.
We brought Puck to the vet which he wasn’t too happy about. Chris or Frankie would have been our exploring the exam room but Puck was content to stay in his carrier.
Eventually, the vet tech came in and put him on the table. She held him while she waited for the vet who was taking longer than she had anticipated.
I told her she didn’t need to hold Puck, he wasn’t going anywhere, so she let him go and he stayed put.
They didn’t do any tests and the vet agreed with my wife and gave us a prescription for Prozac. She said she wanted to start him at a low dose and told us to give him a half of a 10-milligram pill once a day. Considering that the10-miligram pill is considered a low dose for a human, wouldn’t a low dose for a cat be something like one tenth of a human pill? Perhaps someone can explain how that works.
I gave Puck the first half of a pill Sunday evening. I crushed it and put it in his food. Unfortunately, he only ate half his food and I had to throw the other half away before our other cats ate it. The same thing happened Monday evening.
Monday morning Puck peed on the living room floor after I went to work so Rose had to clean it and was not very happy with him. We have tried just about everything so if the pills don’t help I don’t know what we will do about Puck.
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When I took the cat carrier out for Puck’s vet visit, I had little doubt that Chris would end up inside of it.
My wife and I were talking on Monday about how both Frankie and Floki have suffered from bladder problems but Chris has not. In fact, Chris has only visited a vet for a medical problem once in the almost eight years we have had him. That happened after we adopted Floki last year and he spread his eye infection to everyone in the house. What makes that amazing is that Chris is our resident dry food addict and dry food is a major cause of bladder issues.
To understand why dry food is an issue, consider where our domestic cats came from. They evolved from the African Wild Cat which is a desert animal. Since water is scarce in the desert, this cat has adapted to get most of its water from the food it eats. Selective breeding has changed the domestic cat from its wild ancestors but they are still very similar.
Since cats who eat dry kibble can’t get moisture from their food, they must make up the shortfall by drinking more water than their instinct tells them to. If they don’t, they become dehydrated and develop bladder issues.
Of course, just like humans, every cat is different. Some cats drink more water than others, which brings me back to my conversation with my wife, Rose. I mentioned that Chris was probably spared bladder issues because he drinks more water than our other cats. I would even say I see him drinking at least as ofter as the other three cats combined. That’s when we decided to go to Petco and buy a water fountain. The general consensus is that water fountains get cats to drink more and we needed Puck to drink more.
We bought the most expensive fountain they had, which cost $100. It’s a Petsafe Drinkwell Stoneware Pagoda Water Fountain. We liked that it was porcelain and that it looked easy to clean. I found out today I could have got it from Amazon for $60. I even saw it for $60 on the Petco website, which made me feel foolish for not researching it first.
Putting it together was relatively easy. It seemed easy looking at the parts and I almost started without reading the directions but I’m glad I didn’t.
Mounting the pump was pretty straight forward.
The rubber plug was a bit more hard to understand without direction.
It had slots cut out that lined up with the wire. It then folded over the tube to keep water out.
I then put the carbon filter in its housing and put that on top the pump.
That is when I attracted the attention of Frankie.
Puck showed up as finished putting it together.
They were interested in it dry but what about after I put water in it?
As you can see from the video below, Chris was more interested in eating his dry food but our other three cats showed a mild interest. Floki even spent some time drinking but it was not the hit I was hoping for.
Now, almost three days later, I don’t notice any more water drinking than I did before. My hope is that it just takes a little time to get used to it. We did have one several years ago and I seem to remember it wasn’t very popular at first either.
Bad Cat Chris 