His name is either Rocky or Byron, we haven’t decided. Pulled him out from under an old chest-style Coke fridge outside a Route 66 diner in small-town Oklahoma. No family, area is full of cars, dogs, and coyotes, he’s dehydrated, and I am pretty sure he has a respiratory infection.
So he goes to the vet with Fancy tomorrow and we hope they can help us get him into a shelter ASAP. There is literally not enough room for a second quarantine zone here.
Kitten season. Sheesh. SHEESH.
Poor baby. Thank you for caring…
He was crying his lungs out hoping his mother would come back, very loud, big distressed kitten cries. That sound brings me to a dead stop every single time and I can’t walk away. Whatever parenting instinct I have skipped the part where I’m supposed to be weak for human babies (though I very much am as I get older and now that I have had all potential baby-making parts irrevocably ejected) and went straight to kittens.
He does NOT like people, though. He’s very skittish, although still young enough to socialize.
I’m praying we can place him quickly. I hate to say it but he needs more help than I can give him, I think.
This kid. Oh my god.
Rocky is L O U D. VERY VERY L O U D.
Before we packed up to see Dr. R., I got him to take some formula and some wet food, and he was able to relax enough to pee, sort-of cuddle, and give me a tiny tiny very brief purr. So he’s quite tameable. Just a couple of days to bring him around, I think, and he’ll be friendly to at least me.
He seemed to have some pain while peeing, and he definitely has ear mites, fleas, and probably the ubiquitous stray kitten URI. So he’s getting checked out by our favorite vet right now.
I’m still hoping to find a shelter or foster family to take him very soon. I would LOVE to take care of him, he’s at an absolutely delightful age, but I’m at my capacity with the others and wouldn’t want to give him or the others short shrift.
I didn’t plan on this. Babies are expensive. Babies are stressful. Babies are also precious, every kitten’s life is precious, and they all deserve to be taken care of. So I’ll do it for this little dude until I can find someone else to do it.
So, uhh. If you know anyone within a couple of hours of Tulsa (or who is willing to drive) who can take in a super-cute 5-6 week old kitten who is half-weaned, please contact me ASAP.
He’s been checked out by Dr. R, who says he’s underweight and anemic, but otherwise healthy and should bounce back fast.
He has the saddest little face I’ve ever seen.
I’m calling around to shelters but will probably have very little luck. Kitten season = waiting list. I’m doing my best, and goddamn is he adorable, but I am SUPER TIRED.
Again, I’m in Tulsa, and will gladly drive up to 3 hours to place him. That’s 6 hours, for someone who is willing to drive halfway.
We found Scaredy and the carb kittens homes, can we rally for this smol bean?
idk if my followers know anyone in the Tulsa area, but I sure as heck can’t take on a kitten and I’m in a vastly different state, friends.
The demise of Vine is drawing closer. I couldn’t stand the thought of all those cat videos out there being lost to the abyss, so I gathered a few (i.e. nearly 50) of my favourites.
I hope you enjoy this compilation of cats and kittens being funny, silly, or just plain adorable.
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?
I’m 5’8”. I recently hit 130 pounds after lots of hard recovery work and taking care of myself. I remember when I was 5’8” and just over 100 pounds. The way I felt, physically, when I was that thin isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy, let alone this little girl.
@naamahdarling thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you so much. Donation coming your way as soon as possible.
We’ve been lucky, none of our cats were this fragile, and at the time any fell sick we were able to pay without worries.
No cats now and, Ho hum, worries that haven’t gone away, but we can at least Say Fancy’s Name and invite putting something in, or at least aside for, the kitty.
I’m not in a position to donate, but my followers may be… cats like this deserve the tlc that will get them back to health.
When a cat has a specific behavior issue, it’s important to get to the cause of that problem and deal with it. Either you remove the source of the stimulus that is causing the issue, or you help the cat grow accustomed to the stimulus.
There’s a lot of areas where the “remove or get them used to it” plan of attack can get kinda muddy, but if you really boil down most cat issues that’s what it falls to, and there are different ways to deal with both.
Except declawing.
You know, it’s true. Not all cats who are declawed develop “behavior issues”, but when they do, it’s severe. And when they do, you don’t get a say in how you want to handle it. You don’t get the decision. Telling me you don’t want your cat to go on the counters is easy. I can train them not to. Heck, YOU can train them not to. It takes work but it’s doable. But if you tell me you want your cat to be able to walk on the linoleum floor instead of the carpet after you took off the tips of its toes, you don’t have that right. If you want a cat to go somewhere you’re going to have to put down a carpet for it to walk on.
And this has nothing to do about blame. Public information has changed about declawing. A lot of vets refused to do it now. It’s illegal in some countries. I know plenty of amazing cat owners who have declawed cats in the past, who have learned the reality of the procedure, and have vowed to never declaw another cat.
But once a cat is declawed, there is no amount of training that can help them. It’s all about doing what they want. Because they’re in pain. Because they’re scared. Because they have absolutely no defense.
People declaw cats because they don’t want the cat to scratch them. Cats are more likely to use their only line of defense when provoked – biting, which tends to be WAY more severe. Cats who scratch don’t get put down. Cats that bite do. The lack of protection effects every single thing about their lives. How they interact with people. How they interact with other animals.
A declawed cat will still try to scratch at scratching posts.
That fact haunts me. The fact that scratching is so ingrained into a cat’s behavior that they will still try to scratch something even when they no longer have the ability to. Because not only does it feel good and help sharpen their (long gone) claws, but it’s also an incredibly important form of social interaction and scent mingling. Try talking to someone without your tongue and tell me how that goes.
People declaw cats because they don’t want the cat to ruin their furniture. Declawed cats also tend to stop using their litter box because the litter feels like sandpaper against their painful toes. So when you have to throw away your fifth urine-drenched couch, be happy that at least the legs weren’t scratched up.
People declaw cats for lots of reasons. But if that cat develops a problem (or two, or ten), you have to do everything you can make it better. No amount of encouraging them to use the litter box will work if using the litter box is physical torture. Or if they’re too scared to leave from under the bed because they have absolutely no way to defend themselves. You can’t give that back to them.
I am powerless to help. I can give you suggestions that will make the cat’s life the best they can possibly have. But at the end of the day, it’s possible that your cat can’t use a litter box at all because they’re in too much pain. It’s possible that they’re going to keep spraying or marking not because they want to mark their territory but because they LITERALLY can’t do the thing that allows them to safely mark (scratching at a scratching post). I can’t really help you because I’m a Cat Behaviorist, and you’ve essentially made sure that you no longer have a cat.
But y’know. At least they didn’t claw up your chair.
I know people who have been coerced into declawing their animals. Whether for living spaces that would force them to abandon the animal or go without housing for both animal and human involved, or an imbalance in power within a social dynamic; whether roommates or parental/familial situations. It’s not pretty. It’s not EASY. And I don’t blame them for making the choice they felt they had to. I never will.
I’ve owned declawed cats that were abandoned with us…. they did not integrate into the group, and for good reasons. They were traumatized and unable to defend themselves as completely as the others. (A front-declawed neutered male with intact toms…? Doesn’t work out so great.) Rocky got VICIOUS. He loved people, but the second it was too much you got BIT, or he’d tear scratches down your arms with his hindlegs. And that fucker was a BIG cat.
One of my aunts had a declawed siamese. I’ve never HEARD a noisier animal. Not only the vocalization associated with the breed, but ALSO pain because her bowl was in the kitchen… on a tile floor. YIKES.
But then there’s the animals who just sort of accept it and move on with their lives… mostly. The ones where it’s kinda obvious they hurt, but they “don’t let it show.” The ones who still use the box, and snuggle, and don’t try to bite or do anything aggressive… but they don’t really play often either, they don’t scratch, they just sort of… drift.
I’ve never seen a declawed cat with the zoomies. Never seen a declawed cat STREAK up a cat tree to receive love and pets. Either they’re loud and aggressive because they’re frightened and hurting, or they’re passive and drifty. They can be HELPED yes; given things and ways of feeling safer and more comfortable; but…..damn. It hurts my heart to see it.
So, this isn’t an attack on you, emotions are valid etc etc. But I want you look at something, k? Look at the statements in my response, what do you notice?
I’ve owned declawed cats I’ve never HEARD a noisier animal I’ve never seen a declawed cat with the zoomies.
Those are all “I” statements. They begin and end with my personal experience of declawed cats. My experiences are not universal, but they are what I have to go on. Your experiences might differ and that’s fine. But just because you didn’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Yes, I’m sure the declawed cats you have experience with did those things! I see no reason for you to lie.
…and then what happened? What sort of health issues did they experience? What sort of stress were they under? Cats are very very good at not showing their pain. That doesn’t mean it’s not there, and that we shouldn’t take steps to alleviate it where we can.
I’m doing my best, and goddamn is he adorable, but I am SUPER TIRED.
House Of Crows 