Category: Cats

Our first event in a while

An event! But it’s about cats again.

On Sunday we found that our garden cat Kuro had an injury at the bottom of his tail again! We wondered what we should do about it, but we had some things to do that were hard to cancel, so we sprayed it with pure water to calm the infection and kept an eye on it.

On Monday, after we made an appointment with the vet, we put Kuro in a basket and went to the closest animal clinic on foot. Kuro seemed to be upset at seeing unfamiliar places and hearing car sounds. While I went to the bank, Chris continued along toward the clinic with Kuro. He said that a friendly looking elderly man asked him if he was looking for a place to dump the cat. (That’s not why we were carrying the cat!)

Kuro still miaowed in the animal clinic waiting room, and next he was bought into the consulting room. He went wild and scratched Chris and the doctor, who tried to put him in a treatment bag, and finally he jumped over the partition to the dogs’ room. I hadn’t seen such a fierce animal before so I was cowardly and scared of him… Even after he got a sedative and anaesthetic injections, he was still lively for a while, but the vet could finally shave his hair and clean up the bad part.

In short, he got injured because of a fight or something, it got infected, and started to fester. The vet said it got covered over by new skin before it completely healed, then made a cavity between the flesh and skin. He said that even if it looks very bad, open skin is better for healing. We just give him antibiotics and wait for the flesh to rise from inside his body.

Later, he was still partly sedated, we wanted to avoid him making a mess on his injury by playing in his favourite dirt, and we also wanted to put an Elizabethan collar on him if possible. (That’s a cat-cone, to stop him licking his injury.) So we tried to have him inside our house. We were dreaming that he could also be a house cat with Kyoku; however, as we guessed, Kuro tried to claim the whole house, which is kind Kyoku’s only property. And he seemed to look down Kyoku. His behaviour was also not nice to us, as though we were also his possessions. For noisy Kuro’s sake, we suffered the situation well into the night and until early morning, but finally we gave up about. We decided not to make Kyoku the victim of Kuro being inside. (Poor Kyoku: he had a very hard time. His stress would have built up if it continued any more.)

Today is Wednesday. Since we kicked Kuro out, he’s shown up a few times in our yard. He also hated being inside all the time, didn’t he? But he still tries to come inside our entrance hall. We have been giving him wet food mixed with antibiotics and syrup, which sounds terrible. Of course we also feed him dry food at the same time as the other cats. We thought Kuro’s injury became a little better yesterday, but today it became bigger. He probably licked it by himself and made it bigger. We just hope it gets better after a week of antibiotics.

We don’t want him to get more injuries, and we don’t need any more kittens around here. We are still thinking about surgery and shots for Kuro, but we feel gloomy about how much it will cost. We think the black and white ladies (Moku, Komoku, and Icchan) should also get surgery, too. However, if we can afford it, we would want Kyoku to get treatment for his nose trouble first: that’s what we really think.

–YS, 31 May 2006

31 May 2006