Tag Archives: Cats

The Horrible Result of Puck’s Self-Imposed Exile.

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Recently I wrote about Puck’s Self-Imposed Exile when my stepson came for a week at Christmas. He was so fearful that he stayed in our bedroom whenever Nick was in the house.

Puck had no problem coming out to visit Rose’s Dad and his wife when they came at Thanksgiving or my best Friend, Rick, when he came here on New Year’s Eve, but for some strange reason, he decided he was afraid of Rick when he came to visit on Friday. Rick spent the night on our sofa and Puck spent the night in our room, afraid to leave.

I woke up early Saturday morning while Rick was still sleeping. I worried that Puck needed to use the litter box by then so I carried him to the patio and put him in the box. I tried that when Nick was here and got scratched up from Puck trying to escape my grasp out of fear. This time I made it all the way to the box and Puck just seemed slightly nervous. He stayed in the box for a couple of seconds and then jumped out and ran back into the bedroom. I assumed he didn’t have to go so I didn’t worry about it after that.

A little while later Rose was awake and complained that Puck either farted or he pooped somewhere in the bedroom. Normally, Rose’s nose is about twenty times more sensitive than mine and I usually smell nothing while she is acting like the world is about to end, but this time I smelled it too.

I looked around the room and as I was doing that, Rose told me she didn’t want me to use the bed sheets again because they keep popping off. “Okay'” I said, concentrating more on finding where Puck might have pooped. I checked the entire floor, including all the nooks and crannies. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

“Oh my God! It’s on the bed!” Rose suddenly yelled.

I looked and there was a big pile of mashed up poop. “oh, yuck!” I said. “That is gross!”

“It’s on me!” Rose yelled. “I rolled on top of it. Get a wet towel, Quick!”

I hurried into the kitchen and pulled a few paper towels off the roll and wet them.

“Hurry up! What are you doing in there?”

“Here,” I said, handing her the towels.

“No, it’s on the back of my leg. You need to wipe it off!”

As I was wiping it off I had visions of thirty years in the future. “There, it’s off,” I said as I threw the paper towels into the trash bag I brought with me. That is when she noticed another big spot of poop on her leg and the process started again.

The next priority was to pick up the poop off the bed. I had brought a roll of paper towels into the bedroom along with a small bag for garbage but the task was just too gross. Luckily, I remembered Rose didn’t want to use those sheets anymore so I just rolled them up and stuffed them into a garbage bag and took them out to the garbage can.

Puck got over his fear of Rick shortly after that, thankfully, and we now have something to look back on and laugh at but Saturday morning there was no laughing going on in this house.

cats on bed

After the commotion, I put a sheet on the bed to protect it while I washed the mattress cover. That is when Chris and Frankie came in to see what all the trouble was about.

Adjusting to a Limited Ingredient Diet

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A couple weeks ago Puck visited a new vet for his over-grooming problem. The vet said it was probably partly due to stress but he was also having an allergic reaction to something. The vet recommended a Feliway Diffuser for the stress and he recommended switching Puck’s food for three months to see if the problem went away. The vet had food that I could buy but they didn’t push it on me. The dry food was $64 for an eight pound bag. I decided to try my luck at a local natural pet food store where I buy the cat’s current wet food, Earthborn Holistic Chicken Catcciatori.

The Feliway was expensive, over $50 at the pet food store, but I did find it on Amazon for Under $30 so I ordered it. The food was also expensive but getting it at the pet food store was cheaper than getting it at the vet.Limited IngredientLimited Ingredient

I needed to buy a food with a single protein that was unlikely to be in our cat’s current food. The vet suggested rabbit or bison but he did not limit it to those two. He said duck was okay but sometimes an allergy to chicken can cross over to duck since they are both fowl. The woman at the pet food store helped me and we found a dry food with rabbit as the main protein from Nature’s Valley called Instinct Limited Ingredient Diet Rabbit Meal Formula. I shared an Amazon link to the food so you can see what it is but in this case it was cheaper to get it at the pet food store.

While the dry food was more money than normal (I don’t remember what I paid), it was not unreasonable. The Instinct wet rabbit food, however, was too much to justify buying, especially considering that I have to buy it for three cats since I don’t want the trouble of trying to separate them for meals. I don’t know the exact price but it was around $3.50 per can.

The pet food woman found another brand of rabbit food called Wild Calling: Rabbit Burrow, for $1.89 a can. That was just a little more than I was already spending on wet food so we added a few days worth of that food (about 6 or eight cans) to my order. I didn’t want to buy too much in case they didn’t like it.

Finally I picked out a cat treat that was also rabbit. This was yet another brand called Vita Essentials Freeze Dried Rabbit. The one I bought was labeled “for dogs.” It was a larger package then the one for cats but had the same ingredients. The entire order was just under $64.

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They loved the dry food and the treats, but unfortunately, they were not crazy about the wet food. When I would open a can they would all get so excited and then Frankie would give me this “What are you trying to push on us?” look.

20151219_084515After a couple of days of that I went back to the pet food store and we decided that I didn’t need to feed them just rabbit. The goal was to avoid the proteins that Puck was eating such as chicken, beef and salmon. With that in mind I bought food from a company called Mauri. They use a single protein, New Zealand sourced meat that is unlikely to be in American pet food. Their website even says it is great for pets with allergies. I bought New Zealand Unagi, Wild Brushtail, New Zealand Venison, New Zealand Hoki, and Australian Wild Kangaroo.

These are mostly pâté type foods that our cats are not crazy about but they seem to be okay with this food. Chris does not generally care about wet food, he is more of a dry food junkie (hence the girth) but yesterday he would not give up his Venison to Frankie. Usually Puck or Frankie scarf their food down and then take what is left of Chris’s food. Chris usually takes a couple of bites and is done by then anyway or he walks away when he sees another cat coming his way, but this time Frankie had to force his head into the bowl because Chris would not walk away.

20151227_Cats_516The Feliway showed up about a week later and I plugged it into the bedroom where Puck was spending much of his day. He was in a self-imposed exile until Rose’s son left the day after Christmas. I then moved it out into the living room near the door to the patio.

It’s been a couple of weeks now and Rose seems to think Puck’s fur is looking a little better. I am not sure I can see a difference yet. The vet did say it could take eight to twelve weeks because certain allergens can remain in their system for that long. If it doesn’t work, I don’t know what else we can do.

Related posts:

New Vet, New Hope

Puck’s bald spot returns

Puck’s Vet Adventure

 

Christmas Nail Trimmings

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Chris and Frankie got what amounts to a lump of coal in their stocking on Christmas day. They got their nails trimmed. Felice, my sister-in-law who happens to be an expert on cats, was here and Rose couldn’t resist asking her to trim our cats’ nails.

Chris, as usual, put up a big fuss. Frankie was better, and Puck was hiding under the bed so he still has long nails.

They did get presants too. We are not total Scrooges.

Maybe Some Cats Shouldn’t be “Rescued”

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If you have ever looked for a cat to adopt on Petfinder or the website of your local shelter, you may have noticed that a fair amount of them have been ear-tipped. If you don’t know what that is, when a stray or feral cat is captured and fixed, the vet will remove the tip of one ear or put a notch in one ear to show that the cat has already been fixed.

Ear “tipping” or “notching” is usually done for the Trap, Neuter, Release (TNR) programs but sometimes a well-meaning person will trap a cat that is friendly to humans and not release it but put it up for adoption. I believe that is what happened to Frankie, although we know nothing about his history. We do know he has a notch in his ear indicating he was probably captured as a feral, perhaps at a young age.

We know the history of Puck, who was a bottle-fed kitten. Puck will go outside if given the opportunity but he gets nervous easy and then wants to go back inside.

I found Chris in the shelter when he was around five months old. I know he came from another shelter but I don’t know his history before that. I do know Chris loves going outside but he also stays close to home.

Frankie is not like either one of them. He is constantly crying at the door to go out and, while he is not as good about slipping out the door as Chris is, he will get past me sometimes. When that happens, he immediately starts exploring the neighborhood. If I get close enough to catch him, he runs or he finds a car to hide under.

When I put a harness on Frankie and walk him, he tends to travel in one direction. I know most cats have a territory that is smaller than the area that Frankie takes me through. I usually have to coax him to travel in a direction toward home instead of away. The last few outings I stayed out with him a long time to see if he would eventually make his way back home. He didn’t.

cat Frankie on harness and leash

I can’t help but wonder if he would ever want to come home if he escaped and I lost track of him. He might also travel too far and get lost. Frankie has too much of a wild cat in him and I wonder if he wouldn’t have been happier if he was allowed to stay outside in a TNR colony.

Something happened Tuesday night that showed just how wild Frankie still is. We ordered take-out from a nearby Italian restaurant. When the driver arrived, I shut the slider between the house and Florida room, locking the cats in the house and allowing me to open the door without worrying about Frankie or Chris running out.

Unknown to me, Frankie was in the Florida room with me and ran outside when I opened the door. It was dark outside and I had no shoes on. Our grass is loaded with little stickers called sand spurs. They are painful to step on so I quickly paid the delivery driver and ran inside to get my shoes. When I got out, the driver had followed Frankie behind the house to our left and managed to herd him back toward me. Frankie ran right up to our door and I thought the driver scared him enough to want to go back inside but that was not the case.

He continued around to the other side of our house and ran under Rose’s car. The two of us looked for him under the car but it was too dark so I pulled my little key-chain flashlight out of my pocket and looked under our vehicles. He was not there. That is when the driver noticed him near the front door of the house to our right.

I looked over in that direction and saw him standing there with something hanging from his mouth. It took me a couple of seconds to realize what I was seeing and then said, “Oh my God! He has a rabbit!”

I tried to grab Frankie and get him to release his catch but he eluded me and ended up back under Rose’s car. The two of us worked at him from opposite sides of the car, at which point he let go of the bunny and crawled out from under the car. That was when I grabbed Frankie and picked him up while the driver grabbed the rabbit and checked out his injuries.

He seemed uninjured except for a small gash on the back of his neck but he was having trouble breathing. The driver tried to stroke his neck to stimulate breathing but it was soon too late for the rabbit.

After that incident, on Friday, Rose decided to take Frankie for a walk. I hurt my back Thanksgiving morning and was not up to the task so Rose decided that Frankie needed to get out more. She was out with him for a long time and when she returned she said “Never again!” Frankie managed to force his way out of the harness and led her on a chase around the neighborhood.

Those incidents made me wonder whether Frankie’s cushy lifestyle in our home is really what’s best for him. Don’t worry. I’m not going to release Frankie into the wild. In fact, I am watching him now lying upside-down on a soft blanket on the sofa.

cats Chris and Frankie

He seems to enjoy the good life as much as the wild life but I can’t help wonder how many other cats have been “rescued” that may have been better off left alone. I also wonder how many cats were never adopted because a “wild” cat was adopted in their place. What do you think? Is it wrong to leave a feral outside even if it is friendly towards humans?