wallflowerarts Winter squeezed in between Ruth and his mum Nick and wants all the attention tonight #catsofinstagram
My ex feral snuggle bots
It’s another snuggle night for these former street kitties. Winter came and shoved himself physically between my knee and his mother, Nick, and demanded all the attention. My playing with his feet serves a purpose. I’m deliberately touching their feet when they’re relaxed/getting pets because if they’re used to me touching them there, it’s easier to make sure their nails and pads are in good condition, with no injuries, grass seeds, or burrs. This is something I got in the habit of doing with one of our senior citizens, O’Reilly, who since kittenhood has a combo of weak front nails and nail biting leading to lots of ragged nails and split nails, putting him at risk of infection. If you can get a cat used to casual touches to all parts of their bodies in a relaxed setting, it makes preventative health care so much easier. I also scrape tartar from my older cats’ teeth with my fingernails. They’re used to it, and at seventeen, still have great teeth.
Hello everyone! This is Fancy. She is a ~12-13-week-old dilute tortoiseshell kitten my girlfriend found on the street while delivering pizza. Her long coat makes it hard to see how thin she is, but she is very thin. Her bones are so prominent that we have to cuddle her wrapped in a towel or she can’t get comfortable. (Yes, that is exactly as heartbreaking as it sounds.)
In addition to being dangerously underweight, she is suffering from an abscessed bite wound and some sort of problem with her tail, as well as a heavy parasite load that is giving her runny poop issues and sapping her energy. She is too small to even have the shots given to babies half her age.
Despite all this, Fancy is heart-meltingly sweet. She loves people. She talks a lot and even vocalizes softly while purring herself to sleep. She is alert but she tires easily because she has no energy reserves and right now she basically only sleeps, eats, poops, sleeps, cuddles, talks about everything she does, eats some more, and sleeps.
She looks rough now but with some TLC she will be a beautiful cat with a nice, low-maintenance medium-length silky coat and vibrant lemon-lime eyes. We want to find her a forever home, but we can’t do that until she is healthy enough!
We took her to the vet on Monday, July 30 and she has been wormed, treated for earmites, and tested clean for FeLV and heartworms, and her abscess has been cleaned out, which is all good, but she has some challenges.
The vet says that at 3.6 lbs. she is ½ to ¾ of a pound underweight, which is a big difference when you are as small as she is. Imagine being 30 lbs. underweight. That’s scary. This is the biggest hurdle right now. The odds are absolutely in her favor, this is a problem we can fix, but she is still severely malnourished and that presents a very real risk.
Also her tail doesn’t work so great. She can only move the first inch or so closest to her behind, and sometimes it’s hard to get it out of the way when she uses the litter box. If it doesn’t improve as she gets stronger the vet wants to take X-rays to see what’s causing it and what needs to be done.
She has a checkup in 10 days but right now we cannot afford to take her to it, let alone pay for any more unexpected urgent treatment, because today’s vet appointment blew through everything we had saved back.
I’ve set a goal of $700 to cover what we had to pay today for testing, wound treatment, and medication, and the things we had to get to take care of her (piddle pad crate liners, her own toys, some special food to get her weight up, baby wipes to clean up her bottom, all that sort of thing) plus some extra for her next checkup, her shots, and some extra for imaging or in case something unexpected comes up (most likely another abscess, a respiratory infection, or gastritis). We have other cats, one of whom has kidney disease and needs specialized food that costs kind of a lot, so this is putting a big strain on us financially.
Keep spreading the link! We reached our first goal and I’m bumping it up to cover future expenses and surgeries. She also needs to go in to see the vet sooner than I thought because she’s having a little trouble with the abscess.
I will update later tonight with a link to a wishlist for supplies that would help us take the very best care of her we possibly can. She had nothing, she didn’t even have a name. Now she has a name, a blanket, and many, many people on the internet who care about her and want to help her get better and spoil her. You are all rock stars, you’re amazing.
We can now cover imaging for her tail and begin covering treatment that I strongly suspect will wind up being an amputation. She has no feeling in the tip at all, and if she can’t use it for balance or communication and can’t move it out of the way of things like feet, doors, other cats, and so on, it will need to come off as it will only pose a risk. I hope that won’t be necessary.
Also, it’s too early to do it now, she’s too weak, but someday she will be a grown-up girl and will need to be spayed. We’d also like to microchip her. We want to make her as safe and as strong and as healthy as she can be.
Thank you so, so much. Look at this sweet little face. Look at those bright little eyes. That’s what a survivor looks like. She’s a little fighter. Thank you for giving her a chance. We’re gonna make it a real, real good one.
And WOW, can you BELIEVE those EARS?
flightinflame replied: the fact she othersise seems fine shows how well you are looking after her
I guess, I just wish she was in the main part of the house where I could watch her all the time. She’s in what’s essentially a box room right now, because it was the only place to put the two of them where they’d not have access to the outside and also be separate from the other cats and the dogs. I’m just going to have to remember to check on them more regularly and make sure she’s comfortable and healthy.
We worked out in the last day that our calico, Scarlett, has gone blind. This has happened fairly quickly, in the last few weeks. She seems fine, if a little confused, hasn’t lost weight, is still up for purring and pats, she just doesn’t respond to us flapping our hands in front of her at all and isn’t looking up at our faces. I guess it’s a part of her getting old – she’s about seventeen – and as far as we can tell, it’s cataracts, so probably isn’t hurting her at all. No signs of anything that would suggest it’s due to a tumour or anything. Her safety isn’t at risk, because her and O’Reilly have been exclusively inside cats since we moved in with Mum two years ago, so she won’t get lost or anything, but I still feel like I should be doing something, even though there’s nothing to do. She naps all day when she isn’t being fed anyway, and so long as we don’t move her litter tray, food or water she should be able to find things easily, because she’s not disoriented, but still. I feel like I should be doing something.
Because they didn’t feature in my post the other day…
In the background is Nick. Mother, fluffball, waddler, Princess of Knives, singer of songs about her teaser toys. She has claimed my blanket.
In the foreground is Sam, who has settled against my butt to purr after a strenuous ten mintues gently gnawing and clawing my ankles. He’s always been more affectionate than his brother, but he does like to bite when he’s happy. It probably wouldn’t even hurt if I had fur. Alas, my ankles are unprotected and nommable.
We never pressure the cats to spend time with us. Nick is mostly with us, choosing a prime place on the back of a chair or on an unguarded lap blanket, but Sam has spent most of this winter sprawled on the arm chair on the back deck. He’ll occasionally come and take a turn around the room like an Austenian heroine, but otherwise, just accepts pats and food with happy purrs. Tonight, he felt like company, so I thought I’d document that Winter isn’t alone in wanting to be near us under his own terms.
Nuh uh not moving.
November 2016, I saw a tiny tabby kitten slink under one of our cars. Soon, we realised the stray fluffy black cat that lived in Mum’s front yard had two kittens, one black, one the tabby I’d seen.
By March 2017, she’d relocated to the back of the house and, with her kittens was stealing Mum’s elderly cat’s food. I pointed out she’d been living on mum’s property for over a year, and that this was her second litter. We began the process of feeding, socialisation and medical care. We had to get them accustomed to being handled before we could get them desexed, for example. The mother cat was letting us pet her after a week. The kittens, who had never been touched by a human and were by this point close to six months old, took longer.
This evening, Winter, who has been enjoying the gas heater this winter season and coming up for pets semiregularly, climbed up onto the couch and parked himself on my lap for the very first time. It’s been about half an hour, and he’s still there, purring. My tiny scrap of a kitten is now a chunky tom who probably needs less breakfast (my mum overfeeds them), but he’s happy, and the living proof that rescuing animals is worth it. Perhaps I’m more willing to wait and have contact on their own terms because I’m autistic, but there are plenty of people out there who say that there’s a narrow, several weeks long window for socialising kittens born wild, and after that, there’s no chance of a cat accepting a relationship with people. Well, look at my boy. Never touched till he was six months. Not desexed till nearly nine months. Born under a car, and breastfed until I started feeding them, supplemented with whatever they could scavenge or kill. Maybe too many people out there just aren’t open to a relationship that you have to wait and work for.
knitting in the dark 