Need some good vibes for a stray

I had been feeding a feral cat outside of a hotel we were staying at for 2 months. We finally trapped him, under the assumption that he wasn't completely feral, only to find out that he WAS completely feral when we got a hold of him. Or at least he acted that way. He spent about a week hissing at us and swiping at us to the point where we thought we were completely wrong about his non-feral tendencies. Then last night, he suddenly went from acting completely feral and crazy to sweet and loving. It was like a switch. Now he purrs and rubs against us and cries and cries for us when we walk away from him (He's currently in a large dog crate because I haven't figured out if he's healthy or not yet).

So I guess our initial assumptions were right about the fact that he's not really feral at all, so because of this, we've been able to get a better look at him. Last night we noticed that he has a pretty large scar on his back, that looks like it might have been a bite from another animal. Part of his bottom gum looks inflamed, though he's inhaling food, so it doesn't seem to be bothering him. My husband thinks he can feel a tick under his chin, but we want a vet to remove it, since his chin is still kind of hard for us to access. He's ok with us touching it, but only slightly, and he looks like he has ear mites. Then tonight we noticed that he also has a wound on his neck. It doesn't look infected, and its not abscessed, but it does look like its partly an open wound. I'm actually wondering if its a botfly larvae based on the shape of it, and the fact that I can see a hole in the middle of it.

I was waiting to take him to a spay/neuter clinic/vet that deals with ferals (there's a wait list for appointments), but now that he's decided to become a friendly cat, I'm going to just bring him to my normal vet. I've dealt with abscesses before, and infected wounds, so based on my prior experience, I think this will be ok until tomorrow morning, when I plan to wake up, call the vet and take him in ASAP. The wound doesn't seem to be bothering him at all. I watched him for a while tonight and he's not trying to scratch at it or anything. However, I definitely don't think its something that can wait until after tomorrow though.

So I guess I just need some good vibes. We were able to get pretty close to this guy when we were feeding him at the hotel, but not close enough to see just how beat up and rough he looks. He looks like he's had a really hard life, and it makes me want to cry when I see how much he loves us petting him now. Its like he just discovered what human touch feels like and he can't get enough of it. But because of all the minor things wrong with him, and the wound thats definitely not minor, I'm just concerned that he's not going to be healthy overall. I'm afraid he'll test positive for leukemia and having lost a cat to leukemia, I'm just not mentally prepared to deal with that again. Or, I'm just afraid that he'll have more problems that we haven't been able to see yet. I just hope everything can be fixed on him.

So if you can send some vibes my way, kitty (no name yet) and I would greatly appreciate it. Hopefully we'll be at the vet in about 12 hours, and hopefully the vet will be telling us that he's going to be ok.

If anyone has ever taken in a stray with lots of problems and had a good experience with it, I'd love to hear that right now. All of my cats are strays and socialized ferals, but while most of them came to me slightly beaten up, none of them looked as bad as this little guy does .

You trapped him! This is just so wonderful! (Hope in the end the move went smoothly. )

We've rescue a few that were in pretty bad shape. Flowerbelle was much younger, but she was in terrible shape. She'd been attacked by something, and all white, was horribly sunburnt. Her eyes were glued shut from herpes infection, her ears were black with god knows what. Turns out her lungs were also full of lung worm. She needed stitches, to be tube fed, antibiotics, and intensive care. In fact, she was in the hospital for three weeks before she was even well enough to come home, and then I had to medicate her what amounted to 11x a day. In the end, we had to have one of her eyes removed, and she's deaf (not born deaf, she can hear certain frequencies, so it's from the herpes. ). But once that 8 months was behind her, she never looked back.

Last year we rescued Chumley. He had a broken leg that had healed on its own, chronic diarrhea, ticks parasites, and an abscessed bite wound. No bad teeth, but gingivitis. Turned out he was FIV+, so even though he was a 3-year old feral... he didn't go insane inside. I think he was grateful to be rescued. He still doesn't like hands much, but his purr motor is really rolling. It doesn't sound that bad, but... he was in bad shape. Turns out because of the haywire immune system from the FIV (I think), he had issues with allergies, and he started "mowing" the hair off his abdomen.

Hypoallergenic food didn't even help. So we put him on a grain free, all wet diet, probiotics (NOT fortiflora - didn't work for him at ALL. We used acidophilus+bifidus we buy at the health food store, and he takes a human dose), and took him to a vet trained in chinese medicine. We got him a dental (to help with the gingivitis), and I know convenia is controversial, but it really helped his gingivitis (even though it's supposedly not indicated for that, she said her experience is that it's quite good for it), and put him on two chinese meds - one a tincture to stop the diarrhea (worked in 4 days), and a pill to correct his "extreme spleen Qi deficiency." (We'd already treated multiple times for internal parasites and obviously got the external ones cleared up). His itching/mowing stopped, and his coat is now full, thick and incredibly glossy. If we had the money to do the Western Blot again, I suspect he'd test negative for FIV, but I'm don't know. She's had this happen with several cats.

If kitty's got a "nasty," I hope it's FIV, not FeLV. If he's properly introduced to other cats and isn't aggressive to them, it's not an issue if his gums aren't bleeding (that would be the only risk).

it wasn't even a cat attack, or that if it was, he didn't catch anything nasty! And love and a little medication will fix him right up!

to you and your DH!

If you want to read about some miracles, like this boy may need, hissy's blog documents a lot of kitties rescued that sound like this boy. http://www.feralcatbehavior.com

I am beaming with happiness hearing that you successfully trapped the hotel stray. He sounds like he was terrified the first week after his capture and has been on his own for a long time , poor little guy. You are amazing for not giving up . Wow . I am sorry to hear his issues but think these things can be taken care of. Just hoping and sending along mega vibes that he is negative . Really, this made my day reading your post . :vi bes:

I apologize in advance for the length of this.

I have to admit that I'm surprised that you both remembered my hotel cat . There are so many threads on here, so I'm really impressed that people remembered what I had posted! I'm sorry I didn't update my original thread about him. With the move we lost internet for a while, then had it hooked up but not working correctly. And with the unpacking in general, I haven't had a lot of free time to get on the computer. But we did trap him! We had to go back once we left the hotel, although we did try to trap him while we were still there. I don't even know how this happened, but we set the trap out on our last night there, and he walked right into it - but it didn't trigger and close! We went back for the next 4 nights, and left food for him but didn't see him (which wasn't necessarily unusual, but we couldn't just sit there looking out the window for him to show up anymore, so we waited for a bit and then left to come back and try again), and finally on the 5th night, he was sitting in front of the window of the room we used to be in, waiting for us. That time the trap actually worked .

We definitely thought that we misjudged him when we first let him out of the trap. He FREAKED and literally ran up the walls in our bathroom, and eventually planted himself on top of the light fixture...which didn't look comfortable in the least, but he parked himself there for 2 days, growling and hissing and swiping at us. We eventually managed to lure him into a carrier and we relocated him to a huge dog crate on our back porch. He's definitely a male, and he has that nasty un-neutered male scent, which is ultimately why he was relocated outside for the time being. Plus, we needed to use the bathroom, and we didn't want him having any interaction with our other cats until he was tested for Felv and FIV. He has a lot of space in that crate though, and the weather has been really nice, but I still want to just bring him inside .

So as I said before, about a week went by and suddenly he just decided that he LOVES people, and now he's as sweet as can be. I think we just terrified the poor thing at first.

But on to the vet - the appointment went MUCH better than I was anticipating! I definitely get myself too worked up and worried about things. First, he's negative for both leukemia and FIV . That was my biggest relief. The wound on his neck looks bad, but the vet thinks its from him scratching his neck, and he keeps re-opening the wound. Its not infected. It just looks gross because it keeps scabbing over and he seems to keep ripping the scab off. What we thought were ticks, are actually other scabs. I don't know how I managed to think that a scab was a tick, but he really wouldn't let us get a good look at it. All I could feel was a bump that felt like it was sort of hanging onto his skin. He has the scabs all over his head though, which the vet also thinks is from scratching. The scar on his back looks like a bite wound (just based on the shape), but again, it turns out to be from scratching. He scratched his back while in the vets office, and he scratched right over that entire area, so I'm glad we saw that to know what caused it. So right now the vet suspects allergies. He said its most likely the food we're feeding him (which I seriously feel so bad about. We were just trying to help him and we may have been feeding him something that he's allergic too.) He got a steroid shot today, and the vet doesn't want us to switch his food until the shot wears off. He said that since the biggest problem seems to be itching, keep feeding him the same food. If the scratching doesn't start up again when the steroid wears off, then it may have just been an environmental or seasonal thing. But if it starts up immediately again, then he wants to start figuring out what the allergy is. From what I understand he wants us to continue feeding the same food for now because if we stop the food now then he won't be able to tell if it was the food or the steroid that stopped the problem.

As for his swollen gum, he has a fractured tooth and a gum infection. The tooth is on the top, and the gum is infected on the bottom. It looks like the rough end of his broken tooth has been rubbing the gum beneath it. But the vet said the infection wasn't really too bad. It just looked more like an irritation that was turning into an infection. He said that ideally we'll have to remove the tooth, but its one of his front pointy teeth (I know I should know what they are called, but I don't...are they called canines in cat?), so he wants to attempt a course of antibiotics first. He's eating just fine, and currently doesn't seem bothered by the tooth, so he said if the infection clears up with the antibiotics then he'll leave it alone and possibly file down the rough edge when he gets neutered. If the infection doesn't clear up (or if it clears up and comes right back) he's going to take a closer look at his entire mouth and see if that tooth, and potentially others have to be removed. Aside from that though, he said his teeth are really clean, and based on that he thinks that this guy is younger than two years old. He suspects that some kind of trauma happened which caused his tooth to break.

He also has ear mites, but I picked up some Revolution for all of my cats, and he'll get a dose too. He has no evidence of fleas (which truly amazed me because apparently fleas are a huge problem down here) and no evidence of tapeworms caused by fleas. I know that you can't always see tapeworms, but he has no flea dirt on him, so his fur is rough and dirty, but flea free!

Meanwhile, this has turned out to be the sweetest cat ever! I was afraid of how he would act at the vet. Based on how he freaked out when we first brought him home, I thought the same thing would happen at the vet. Then on our way there, he peed in his carrier, which has never happened to me before, so I was a little embarrassed to walk in with a cat smelling so bad. The tech was a little worried about opening the carrier based on what I had told her about him, but when she did, he came right out, flopped over on his side and just started purring and kneading the air, and rubbing up against me, the tech and the vet (which in turn made us all smell like cat pee, so that was kind of embarrassing for me. I know they deal with stuff like this all the time, but I still felt bad. One of the techs said "Its always the ones you don't want to touch who will rub all over you - they're always the sweetest." I'd have to agree.)

So now I have to keep an eye on him for the next two weeks. Then he'll get his vaccines (the vet didn't want to do the vaccines and the steroid shot at the same time), and get neutered, and then I really need to find this guy a home!! We're definitely at our max with cats here, but this guy is definitely a sweetheart and deserves a good, happy home. He looks rough and beat up though. Thats the kind of cat I would want, but it seems like most people want cute kittens, or pretty/perfect looking cats. Hopefully, I'll be able to find someone who will take in a sweet cat who apparently lived a rough life on the streets. I also need to come up with a name for him.

OH WOW!!!!!!!!!! This is just THE best update . YAY negative for FeLK/FIV and I am SURE the vet's are used to a kitty peeing out of fear in the crate. Happens a lot! AND of course, we remember you. You are a cat champion and stand out because of your great rescue of this boy who needed someone like you to step up and do it! :.

I would also think that was a tick, but glad it wasn't. . For the ear mites, you will need to do the Revolution at least two to three weeks apart. And this will also take care of any possibly "mange", if he even had any, which I doubt. I know this costly to you, . And I feel for you on that front. I do know how quickly these rescues/foster's put us in the poor house. I just think for the ear mites you have to apply the Revolution sooner than one month for it to be effective against mites/mange. .

AWWWWWW he sounds really sweet. And isn't it amazing how they can freak out like that, sitting on the light fixture for two days. Poor baby, he was totally panicked and on high self-preservation mode at first not knowing what you would do to him. The good thing was that he already knew you , so there was a little bit of comfort there for him. Good plan about the dog crate, nothing wrong in the least about that . This is just a temporary set-up until such time as he is neutered, has shots, wormed and those ear mites are all gone. At least, he is SAFE thanks to you and your husband .

Hopefully his allergies won't be such an issue with feeding him, another . I have a cat now with food allergies, not fun. I guess I would just get him on the same food you feed your other kitties and see how it goes. Would love to see a picture sometime if he allows . Loads more vibes coming your way that you can find this sweet guy a furrever, safe home

Everything Feralvr said!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We have a kitty that pees every time in the crate on the way to the vet. We prepare for it now by putting down several layers of weewee pads, and I sit in the back with him, and just open the crate and pull out the soiled weewee pad (and put in in the plastic bag we bring to throw out when we get to the vet LOL).

Awww, they understand about scared kitties!

:vibes the steroids help, and you'll be able to find him his furrever home.

That's one lucky boy.

Bless you for rescuing this boy and bringing him into your home!!  Hope all goes well with his integration into your home.

Some of the best cats start out as strays. I know a lot of people would disagree with me, but I think it's because they truly appreciate having a home and people to care for them. The best advice I can give you is to be very patient and to give him all your love.

I'm sorry its been several weeks since I updated this thread. So a quick update before I post a new thread asking a question about another stray cat.

Hotel kitty, who is now being called SK (for stray kitty - creative I know), is doing wonderfully! His wound has completely healed. He doesn't seem to be having any allergy problems now that the steroid shot has worn off. So we're not entirely sure why he was scratching himself so much, but whatever was causing it seems to have stopped. His fractured tooth is doing fine. The gum infection went away so now he just has a broken tooth, which unless something else develops from that, he won't need to have removed. There's no TNR program in place in this town, and for a low cost spay/neuter clinic they require an animal to have had a rabies shot for at least 3 weeks before they'll do surgery. So poor Mr. SK is still living in a large dog crate for the moment. He does spray, so I can't bring him into my house until I get that under control (which will hopefully be under control once he gets neutered). He gets "outside crate time" every day though. But it has to be supervised because now there's a new stray roaming around my yard and I don't yet know what his health situation is. SK got his rabies shot about a week ago - once he got a health all clear from the vet, and will go in to get neutered in 2 weeks as per town law.

I know someone asked for a picture of him a while ago and I will post one soon! I have some good ones of him, but my husband has the camera with memory card and he's out of town for a few days.

I'm still trying to find him a home - unsuccessfully, but I'm trying to not be too discouraged yet. He's a little lover, so I'm still hopeful that someone will want to take him in.

And on that note, I'm off to post a new question about a new stray cat...they all just seem to keep finding me....

Aw GREAT news!

Brooklet425 said:

..and for a low cost spay/neuter clinic they require an animal to have had a rabies shot for at least 3 weeks before they'll do surgery...once he got a health all clear from the vet, and will go in to get neutered in 2 weeks as per town law.

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OK, I've never heard of anything like this before. :lol3: Even the quarantine period to determine if a cat has been infected with rabies is 10 days... so why the wait period would be 3 weeks is a real mystery!

LDG said:

Aw GREAT news!

OK, I've never heard of anything like this before.

Even the quarantine period to determine if a cat has been infected with rabies is 10 days... so why the wait period would be 3 weeks is a real mystery!

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I agree! I think its the dumbest thing ever! My husband actually didn't believe me when I told him that was the town policy (I'm not sure if its an actual law or just a policy), but here's the link to a  PDF document with the requirements on it: http://www.cctexas.com/files/g15/ACPublic Spay-letterhead.pdf

Regular vets will spay/neuter immediately after a checkup and initial vaccines. But this is the low cost clinic run by the city, and unfortunately, low cost is the way I have to go right now. Every other city I've lived in had feral TNR programs where they got a rabies shot on the exact same day that they got neutered. I'm learning very quickly though, that this town is really backwards when it comes to animals.

HI and SO glad SK is doing well. I also have NEVER heard of this three week rabies requirement before surgery :dk:.... TNR vet's do everything all at once on one day. Just odd. And backwards as you say :lol3: You do what you have to do though, right