Our tabby:
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| Maisie via the M6/90mm; FP4 on old Kentmere Fixed Grade paper It's hard to see her markings in this very poor shot but she is rather lovely, with a thick striped coat and a tail like a lemur. |
She's got PTSD at the minute, the poor thing. We arrived back from the Liverpool-Belfast ferry early last Wednesday morning and discovered that she wasn't putting her hind leg down. Uh-ho, we thought...has she twisted it climbing, or worse, broken it? So, no rest for the wicked and all that - off we trotted to the vet. We have local vets but most of them appear to have been taken over by some larger concern and seem more interested in ££ these days than anything else so we go to a country vet about 12 miles away in Garvagh. Unfortunately she got very stressed - started panting like a dog, which is apparently a sign of respiratory distress, so the vet gave her some painkillers and antibiotics and suggested we bring her back the next day, when they would stand a better chance of x-raying her. The good news is that after a close examination the following day the vet discovered she'd been bitten on the lower leg - a bite which was becoming infected. So, more painkillers and antibiotics and thankfully she's been as right as rain since then.
Well, physically she's OK, but she's not back to her usual self yet. She's sticking very close to us (and our other cat) these days, and while she's normally a very affectionate cat anyway, she's looking for even more attention than usual. There is one large feral cat that plagues us (her in particular) and we think what happened is that it has caught her on the leg as she was making a dash for the safety of home, via the cat-flap - just nipping her trailing leg, perhaps. Hopefully she'll be back to her old self soon.
Sorry to hear about the kitty-cat. We used to take Amice into the garden when we lived in a house, but we kept him on a leash and we never left him alone. The feral cats in that neighbourhood (Especially Ms. White and Bushy Tom) would have made short work of him.
ReplyDeleteWe've a couple of unwanted feline visitors that torture our two, but our tortoiseshell doesn't get a tenth of the attention that Maisie (above) gets. Maisie is a big tabby and the vet thought that might be why she gets the attention, maybe some sort of threat/dominance thing.
DeleteBefore we installed the cat flap we tried both outside on a lead. Maisie wasn't too bad, but Minnie the tortoiseshell acted like she'd been hit by an invisible paralysis ray and resolutely refused to stand up or move. So we got the cat-flap and left them to it. They come and go as they wish, all day and night if they want. They come home to eat, rest and get some human attention.
Has anything else come in through the cat-flap? Encyclopaedia salesmen, for example?
DeleteHaha not yet! Nothing unexpected apart from the odd mouse (usually dead, but not always)
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