Cutie and Lydia, Ella Too

Cutie has her own song, by the way. Every cat should have a song. With my apologies to the The Kinks, it's sung to the tune of "A Well Respected Man." It goes like this.

Cutie Kitty is oh, so good;
Cutie Kitty is oh, so fine;
Cutie Kitty is oh, so healthy
in her body and her mind;
She's a well respected cat about town;
Doing the right thing so intuitively.

 

At about a year and a half, Ella is at the age where so many things are new to her and she is so excited about new experiences. She doesn't go outside regularly, but I let her out sometimes when I can be out there with her. Usually, she's pretty good about it but sometimes she doesn't want to come in when I'm ready to bring her in, and will go under the shed and refuse to come out, or cross the fence to the neighbor's yard. She knows she's wrong when she does that because she goes into her submissive stance, but cause and effect thinking doesn't come naturally to a cat.

Today, I had all three of the cats outside. Lydia, one of the older ones, wanted to go back in the old way, up the fire escape and in through an upstairs window that I used to have a cat door in. Cutie was grazing on grass, and Ella was around the shed, where I know there are mice and voles, and who knows what else, although she hasn't caught any yet. Then I didn't see Ella. I called for her, and she didn't appear, as she sometimes (usually) does. So I bought Cutie back in the house, which she was okay with, and went to look for Ella. I was on my hands and knees trying to find her under the shed, but I didn't see her. I walked down the tracks calling for her, as there is an unused railroad track behind the house. Back to the shed, I thought I heard a meow but I couldn't tell where it was coming from. She sometimes believes that if she replies to my call verbally, she is fulfilling her part of the bargain. I called her again and she replied.

Eventually, I realized that the meow was coming from above, and found her way up high in maple tree. She looked helpless. I'm 63, and it's been a few years since I've tried to climb a tree. So I called for her. She started climbing down backwards, which was working but, since she couldn't see where she was going, she was nervous about it. Then she came to a branch, where she could turn around, and then she didn't want to return to climbing down backwards. After a few attempts at coming down head first, she was back at the branch. She started to go back up, since that was easier, then returned to the branch. She started looking around, as if judging the distance for jumping to the ground, or to another tree, then decided against that.

Finally, I had to get a ladder. Now, this was a solid metal ladder that I bought fifteen years ago when I could still carry the thing. Today, it was quite a chore but I managed to drag it over to the tree and, with even more difficulty, lift it up onto the tree. It was a high tree, but not a terribly thick one, so it didn't rest firmly on the tree. Nevertheless, I climbed that wobbly ladder. Once I got closer to Ella, she started to panic for some reason. Maybe she thought I looked pretty scary on a ladder or perhaps she thought her chances were better on her own. She climbed up to the next higher branch. Going up is easy for a cat but the curvature of their claws don't allow them to descend as easily. Fortunately, the ladder went higher, which meant that I had to go higher too, and I was able to get her.

If she could talk, she'd probably say that the squirrels made it look so easy.

 

As I have mentioned earlier, Lydia has been pretty thin and feeble lately, and I have been concerned about her. I spoke to a veterinarian online, who suggest hypothyroidism as a possible cause of her trouble. However, the testing itself was going to cost $600, and that wouldn't include any treatment for the problem. Please understand that it's not the Lydia isn't worth it to me, as I love her very much. but she is twenty-five and I am looking at what might a bill in excess of a thousand dollars, which I don't have.

She would go through periods where she was first in line waiting to eat, and would eat quite a bit in one sitting, then throw it all up over the next couple of hours. Then she would spend a few days turning down pretty much everything unless, for whatever reason, something really caught her attention.

Looking for alternatives that were realistic, as far as my budget goes, I began looking for foods that she would both eat and not throw up. As thin as she is, she needs calories.

She has started to beg for food while I am eating, which was previously her sister's domain, so I started preparing some cat-friendly versions of what I was eating, without all of the salt and peppers and stuff that I might add to it. I found that if I put a plate of chicken on the floor for her, she would eat very little of it, but if I fed it to her one small piece at a time, she could eat a lot of it, and she didn't seem to throw it up.

She has been especially insistent on begging for cheese, which is not something that I would ordinarily feed to a cat, and still wouldn't want a younger cat to get hooked on eating cheese. But, as old and thin as she is, I am willing to give her anything that will add calories and energy, so I've given her a small amount of cheese every now and then.

I've been paying attention to which cat foods she would eat, and which she wouldn't, and I've found that there is no consistency in that. Foods that she loved one day she would turn down another, and vice versa. However, she does seem to do better with the canned foods that have the most moisture content, so I've been looking for those. Still, she's not eating as much cat food as she had in the past.

Doing these things, I have found that she has been vomiting less and when I pet her, I can see that she's not as bony as she was before, although she's not nearly as filled out as I'd like her to be.

I spoke to a lady at a premium pet store in Portland, Maine, and she recommended a food additive that uses slippery elm and psyllium seed. Although intended as a hairball aid, she said that it often helps as a digestive aid. I started crumbling that into her food. and it seems to have helped, although at least half the time she doesn't eat it. Still, she has vomited only once in the last few days, and that was after eating grass outside.

I ordered a can of CatSure, which is like Ensure for cats, on Amazon.com. I ordered just a single can, as an add-on item, because I wasn't sure that she would even drink it. I had tried it with her mom after her mom got cancer and was having trouble eating, but her mom wouldn't drink it.

Over the next week, Amazon.com kept extending the shipping date, so I would gather that they were having trouble fulfilling the single-can offer. Then, because they couldn't send the $3.69 single-can order that I had placed, they sent me a case of CatSure at the same price, which ordinarily costs $47.88. That's one of the things I like most about Amazon.com. When something goes wrong, they seem to go out of their way to make it up. The CatSure arrived this morning, and Lydia liked it.

Hopefully, with the combination of things that I am trying, she will be able to put some weight on. Already, she's put some on and, just this morning, she decided to leap up to the first shelf on the cat tree rather than using the stairs that she has been using lately, so I'm thinking she's feeling better.

 

Ella caught her first bird today, and hopefully the last. I know how some of you may feel about cats killing birds, and I don't disagree with you really, except that I have to acknowledge that this is what cats were made to do. So, by definition, when she caught the bird, she was being a good kitty.

She had caught a couple of mice in the house, which I had no quarrel with at all, and that was more than any of my other two cats have done in their lifetimes. I don't believe Cutie ever killed anything bigger than a bug, and I'm not sure about that. Lydia caught a bird once, held it for a few moments, then let it flay away, holding to catch and release principles.

I don't let my cats outside alone anymore. Rather, I take them out with me for an hour or two on nice days. Meanwhile, Ella sits in the window watching the birds at the feeder, in full predatory stance, building up an ulcer while she fantasizes about catching one of them.

Ella is just under a year and a half. We adopted her as a kitten when we were living up north, then took her with us when we moved back to Millinocket. Since our Millinocket house had been largely vacant for over a year, some mice had moved in. Only a few months old at the time, Ella caught one of them the first day, and another a couple of weeks later. She still stalks out parts of the house, so she probably detects others in the walls or somewhere.

This morning, I let her and Cutie out the upstairs window, as there is a fire escape leading to the ground. Then I came around through the door so that I could be out with her, and Ella already had a bird in her mouth, desperately trying to get back inside the window with it so that she could "take it home."

When I play Da Bird or other capture toys with her, when she is able to grab the toy, she want to carry it somewhere, so I refer to that as bringing it home. That's what she wanted to do with the bird.

It was dead. The mice were dead. She doesn't torture them, but kills them instantly, and she had no interest in playing with it. She just wanted to bring it home. Whether she would have eaten it, I don't know because once I was able to distract her, I disposed of it. Yeah, I know that it probably would have been healthy for her but there's something about letting a cat tear a bird apart that repulses my wife, for some reason.

Anyhow, as it stands, although I would really rather she not kill birds, she was being a good kitty, and it would have really confused her if I let her believe otherwise.

 

The fact that so many people today do not want, or won't allow, their cats to kill and eat birds and smaller animals today must be confusing to the cats. Their skills as predators were the main reason why people took cats into their farms and houses, and it hasn't been very many generations since that was what people wanted from their cats. Indeed, people living on farms are still looking for that.

So when a cat comes home with a bird or a mouse in its mouth, it rightfully expects to be praised for being such a good kitty, for having done its job. How confusing it must be when they are punished for having killed a bird or a rodent, or when the feedback they get is one of repulsion rather than delight.

So when Ella comes home with a bird, I let her know that she is a good kitty since she is doing what a cat is supposed to do, and she did it well. At the same time, I will try to reduce her chances of doing it again without actually confining her to the house.

 

I've mentioned it before, that Cutie has developed a means of communicating by "buying" time from me by bringing me toys. She has since extended that to using a toy as a prop to ask me to go outside, for food, or for a treat. She also bring them upstairs to me while I am sleeping, but I'm not sure what she wants with that one. I set one of my wildlife cameras up on the stairs last year, and caught Cutie going back and forth with different toys. Here she is a five o'clock in the morning, bringing a toy.


It is not unusual for us to get up to find a trail of toys leading from the bedroom to the stairs. The best I can figure out is that Cutie is trying to get me to get up and follow her to my office, or wherever it is that she thinks I should be. She probably doesn't understand that people sleep eight hours or more at a stretch, and that we can't necessarily just sleep wherever we are, as she can.

 

If that were the case, I'm afraid she would be quite energetic in her play. On nice days, I take the cats out and let them play in the yard while I'm out there, and they are pretty good about that. However, Ella has already killed one bird, and chased a squirrel up into the trees a couple of times. Unless she surprises them, I don't think she'd be able to catch a squirrel since they are quite fast and amazingly acrobatic. Ella goes pretty high up into the tree but the squirrels can go into the tiniest branches and jump from one tree to another. The squirrels scold her from the safety of the trees. One even came down lower, to be sure that Ella could hear her better.

 

Two my cats, Cutie and Ella, were outside today; Lydia isn't so interested in going outside anymore, as she's not doing so well. When I let them out, I am either out there with them or I check on them periodically, to discourage them from wandering too far. I leave the porch door open for them so that they have a semi-protected (and cooler) area to retreat to if they should need to, since the door isn't left open wide enough for a dog or larger animal to get through. My wife and I were going to the store. When we opened the door to the porch, Ella was lying there with a dead mouse alongside her. She doesn't eat them, and probably doesn't even realize they're edible, but she wanted to stick with it to be sure that she got the credit for it, and not Cutie, who has never caught anything so far as I am aware. Once we got the mouse, she went back outside, all proud of herself.

 

I have a few toys that I use to play with her that are basically toys on a string tied to a stick, like Da Bird, which is her favorite.


Ella woke me up this morning by tapping me on the my arm, which was near the end of the bed. When I looked down, she was standing there holding Da Bird in her mouth, and wanting me to play with her. Apparently, I had missed the first summons because she had brought another string toy up on the bed. She had to open my dresser drawer and rummage through my clothes in order to retrieve these toys, which were at the bottom.

 

Cutie has learned to ask for things by bringing me a toy and meowing. A toy, of course, can be anything that she can pick up and carry in her mouth. She began doing this when she wanted me to slide her around the floor in her box, or fly her through the air in her box, or simply lift the box, with her in it, and spend some time with her. Then she expanded it to other things, like asking to go out or asking for food.

Once she has my attention, she drops the toy on the floor and then leads me to whatever it is that she wants. If it's her box, she'll get in it and lie down. Otherwise, she will go to her food dish or the back door. If I don't hear her or if I'm busy and I don't attend to her right away, she'll get another toy and try again. Sometimes I am made to feel bad when I finally notice her, and find three toys lying on the floor, so I try to make a habit of dropping whatever I'm doing to attend to her right away. There are days, though, when she would demand all of my time, and once I actually had to put the toys up where she couldn't reach them because it was every ten minutes.

A moment ago, she dropped a "toy" for me, then led me to the water bowls. Sure enough, they were both empty. The toy was a pair of my socks that she picked up off the bed where my wife had put the laundry while she was sorting it.

 

Lydia was a good daughter. Her mom lived to be twenty-two, and Lydia was at her side the whole way. Lydia was not a great mom, however. She had only one litter of kittens, and only one was born alive. Her mother, Baby Girl, had a litter of kittens just a couple of weeks before. Lydia nursed her kitten for about a week, then carried it over to her mom's bunch, dropped it off, and never looked back. Like many human babies, her kitten was raised by its grandmother.

 

Lydia is not so healthy anymore, but she has good days, and this was taken on one of her good days. She is on the very top of the cat tree, which is unusual in itself since she doesn't climb very well, high or often anymore. She's twenty-five years old. That is her come pet me look.

 

Lydia is awfully thin. She has hypothyroidism, and probably some other problems but this can be expected when you consider that she will be twenty-six years old in December. That's old for a cat, older than the oldest acknowledged age for a cat. Unfortunately, I can't prove that both she and her sister were born in December of 1990 because, in Texas, veterinarians insisted on vaccinating cats and I did not, and do not, want my cats to be vaccinated. In fact, I attribute their longevity to two things: premium food and a lack of poisons being introduced into their systems. Cutie is the same age, but without the medical problems.

Lydia is not very interested in eating anymore. She will pick at kibble, and there are times when she will eat more than her share of wet food, but she throws a large percentage of it up. Since eating is not something she's inclined to do, I rotate a wide variety of premium foods into her diet in order to keep her interested, and that works to an extent. At the same time, eating a variety of different foods can sometimes result in vomiting. Still, as long as it goes in, I can assume that her system is absorbing some of it and that's better than simply walking away. At her age, whatever I can get her to eat is better than the alternatives.

She has also developed the habit of begging for people food, which is not something I would generally feed them, except for small tastes of it. By the same principle, at her age I will let her have pretty much whatever she wants. So she eats cheese, ham, chicken, and any other meats that I am eating. I do keep some to the side that is not salted, so that she's not taking in the sodium. At twenty-five, she is on borrowed time, so I'll make whatever allowances I can.

I sneak supplements into her food whenever I can that are supposed to aid in digestion, and that seems to help as long as she is eating it. Whenever I can get her to not throw up for even a few days, she starts to fill in again. But then, she will decide to fast.