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What will I do about the poor stray cats?
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26-03-2009 2:15pm#1
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MsFifers,
If the cats are strays and in bad shape, they will almost certainly be infested with worms, which is part of what's keeping them thin. The one with the bad mouth could well have a broken jaw, which is a common enough injury in cats incurred through trauma like a glancing blow from a car, being kicked or thrown or falling from a height. The broken jaw will need to be fixed with corrective surgery. It isn't cheap, and the recovery time is at least six weeks of having a wired jaw.
They are also potential carriers of all of things that you vaccinate your cats against, so no, I wouldn't be letting mine anywhere near them.
See if you can get a cat trap from a local vet even, and this is going to sound brutal, but if you're not going to take them in yourself and you exhaust all possibilities of rehoming them, they need to be humanely euthanised.
If the potential broken jaw cat is indeed suffering from that, then the two halves of his bottom jaw grate against each other every time he tries to eat or drink or groom himself. He would be in pain and will slowly starve to death.
Trap-neuter-release as a solution only works with feral cats when there is a community of people who feed and worm the stray cats regularly and who can club together and afford vetinary care if one requires it. If that isn't going to be the case because you're moving house and nobody else will be minding them, and you can't find a better homing solution, and you can't find an agency to take the animals, you only have two choices: leave them there in that state, or have them humanely euthanised at the vet.
It's an unfortunate fact that when you keep cats, strays will gravitate to your property because they realise there are well-fed and well cared for cats in that area, and the more cats you have, the more strays will rock up! It's never the people with no animals who might be able to afford it who find strays in their garden, it's the people with three and four animals already who are bankrupt feeding and vetting their own pets.
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Update: I can get a trap on Monday, but my next question is for people who might have experiencing trapping cats - do I have to stay near the trap the whole time and bring the cat in to the vet straight away?
The problem is I have to pick up the trap on Monday morning, but I have to work, so can't really hang around for the day. And then- if the cat goes into the trap in the evening, I'd have to keep it in there until the next morning - which wouldn't be nice if the cat had to go to the toilet etc.
How do you do this?
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Leave both food and water in the trap. Even if the cat knocks over the water bowl, you can at least refill it if it's in there. You can also try including a litter tray, depending how big the cat trap is. Make-shift litter trays for small enclosures include an old takeaway box (one of the plastic ones, washed out), one of those disposable tinfoil roasting trays or a large pot plant saucer.
Leave the trap out whenever (leave it somewhere sensible, sheltered from the elements in case the cat is in there for a while before you find it.
Check it every so often. You may even hear it snap shut - leave it somewhere you can see it from your window. Once the cat is caught, take it to the vet as soon as possible. If it wasn't feral, and you had to keep it overnight, I'd suggest releasing it into a closed room in your house, e.g. a bathroom, but if it's going to be too hard to catch again, then leave it in the cage overnight, in a quiet area.
To make the cat less anxious, cover the trap with a cloth or some cardboard, but allow peep-holes, so they can see a bit of what's coming or going, but still feel hidden themselves.
The mouth guy needs to go to the vet asap. If his jaw's broken, the same trauma could have broken teeth or caused him to bite his tongue, and the black gunk may well be a lot of dried blood. One of my guys was hit by a car once, back when he was an outdoor-indoor cat (he's indoor-only now). His bottom jaw was broken and he bit through his tongue in two places, it had to be sewn up which he was under having his jaw wired.
If nobody's going to take the mouth guy on as a project, heartbreaking as it is he needs to be humanely put to sleep.
Once you've caught them let us know how you get on. Last thing - don't be tempted to try befriending a feral cat that's in a cage. It's more stressful for them to have you sitting watching them than it is to be locked away in a quiet room in a covered cage.0 -
Well, here's the update. I got the cat trap yesterday, and got ol' Bud (as I'm now calling the cat with the mouth injury) into it last night. He was nice and quiet for the night, and didn't make much of a fuss about it at all. I think he could easily be tamed because he is a nice calm cat really. He was actually calmer when he could see me than when he was on his own - I think its a good sign of his attitude to humans!
Just rang the vets, and it turns out that he has a fractured jaw, but they said that it will heal on its own. This I find a bit strange, but I guess they are the experts.
They neutered him also, so he can't go back outside tonight because of the anaesthetic. The vet nurse that was there in the morning said that they would keep him for a night - but the one I spoke to on the phone just now asked me to take him home because he stinks!!
I'm a bit stuck now because I don't really have a room to keep him in in the house I'm in at the moment (I'm still house-sitting) and I think two nights in the trap would be a bit cruel. They said they would keep him if I was stuck, so I think I'll have to leave him to them.
Anyway - now I just need to find a nice farm for him to go and live on!0 -
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MsFifers, you've done a good thing, but I'd be pushing the vet more on the jaw question. Is it his lower or upper jaw that's fractured? And how bad is the fracture? To the best of my knowledge, dealing with my own cat and with a shelter that takes in injured cats, the jaw won't heal properly without wiring if it's a lower jaw break or fracture. I'd push them on it in case they're not willing to push surgery on you because he's just a random stray.
They might be worried that you wouldn't pay up for a stray cat - see I find that the vet nurse would suggest you take him home because he smells to also be very suspicious. I've taken injured cats to the vets before that took such a fright at their trauma that they've been covered in their own faeces and urine, and the vet nurses ALWAYS took care of it, cleaning them up while they were sedated (or not, if they had leet cat-wrestling skills).
I'd be concerned that if you took him in and said 'he's just a stray', they aren't giving him the care he needs because they're worried that you won't cough up after they do the work - or they're worried that you won't do the aftercare, so they won't wire the jaw because of the six week healing time where he'd need to be supervised by you.
If that's the case, Bud is better off put to sleep.
What's the update since then, and how's the cat?
(PS: I had an incident once with a vet, I took them a cat with a cruciate injury. The first vet wanted to operate and wire her cruciate and then confine her for six weeks until the injury healed to ensure she would have long-term use of the limb and no early onset arthritis. It wasn't my cat, so while I would have gone for that option, the person who owned the cat had to approve it. When the owner returned from holidays and went back to the vet three or four days later, the owner hummed and hawed over the cost and seemed a little reluctant - and suddenly, the vet's advising that the cat should just be confined for six weeks and doesn't need surgery and will heal perfectly well without it. Well I looked like a moron, I can tell you. That confinement is the only treatment the cat got, and on bad weather days she hangs that back leg out straight because bending it is already getting stiff and painful, and she's three years old. ) 0 -
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This is the bitch of it, isn't it? The cat's a stray, but once you start to commit yourself, it becomes really difficult to say "Okay, that's enough, it's the pound/big kitty litter in the sky for you".
First, car: don't replace the seat. Go to a a professional valet. They can steam clean the seat and give you info regarding whether or not it'll ever be the same again. If you tell them you just want them to handle the seat, it might actually not cost the earth (but if you go for a full valet it will )
The jaw: the healing thing is part of the problem. Sometimes they will start to heal on their own, but as you say, they don't set straight so the cat's scissor bite on that side is never accurate. I don't know to be honest - but instead of taking him to another vet, see if anyone knows a vet that is sympathetic to cats, and get an opinion from that vet over the phone. Vets won't diagnose something over the phone, but they will tell you what could be done about that jaw and let you know your options.
The teeth cleaning and neutering are both valuable for the cat - and the work on his mouth will have helped clean up some of the residual gunk from the jaw hopefully. The neutering is invaluable - if nothing else, you've done something for the rest of the feral cats that he'll never father now.
Do you know if he got a worm tablet?
My sympathies on your vet experience. When the vet seems disinterested in your animal it's very upsetting - but I tell you now, I reckon it's because he's a feral cat and they either think you're mad or that you won't pay, plus they probably don't like having to handle him. Gits.0 -
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