View attachment 198537 WARNING: This may be a long post. I'll try and keep it snappy but this cat has a complicated history...I would sincerely appreciate any advice. Here goes:My husband and I were living in South Korea in 2014 and found an abandoned kitten outside our apartment in about May of that year. She was skin and bone and had a bad eye. We took her to the vet and he said she was probably about 6 weeks old, and we could leave her with him or keep her. We kept her and called her Allie. We treated her eye with two separate medications four times a day for the entire year we were living there, then when she was old enough to handle it, we organised for her eye to be removed (her eyeball kept filling with fluid and had to be constantly drained. We decided we'd bring her back home to Australia with us and there was a significant danger of her eyeball rupturing due to the pressure. Plus it was causing her pain). No word of a lie, she was the best cat I've ever had. She loved everyone, would jump on their lap, lick them - even perfect strangers. She didn't even freak out at the vet. One person would be sticking her with a needle and the other would be clipping her claws and she wouldn't fuss a bit.
Fast forward to March 2015 and we drop her off at the international vet in Seoul to have her sent home. Due to unexpected circumstances, we have to stay behind and work for another few weeks, so we're separated from her for about a month by the time we get back (my mother picked her up from the airport and looked after her). My mum tells me she's a maniac, stalking and attacking people in the house. We think it's just because she's in a new place without us (the only people she really knew) and she'll settle down once we get home.
At the time of writing this, it's October 2017, and she is still a maniac. She attacks strangers (and not-so-strangers, including my mum) completely without provocation, and will actually hunt them down to attack them - she doesn't run and hide. She attacks me, also unprovoked, and sometimes my husband. She behaved herself with our daughter when she was born, looking out for her when she cried, but now that my daughter is 18 months old, she gets fed up with her easily and bites her on the face/head/feet - wherever she can reach. She's just trying to warn her to stay away, but she's bitten close to her eye before and that to me is unacceptably dangerous. We spent thousands getting her home because we love her, and we've spent thousands more on professional behaviour therapy, which ended in us putting her on prozac for 6 months (as a last resort) to see if it helped. It didn't. Then I convinced myself maybe a diet change would help. It didn't. So we got another kitten for company (she has bad - and I mean BAD - separation anxiety), and she loves it to bits, but it hasn't helped her anxiety or bad behaviour. She chews up our daughters toys and walks around the house yowling like she can't find me. The neighbours complain that she yowls constantly when we're out. She bites her fur out and has bald patches on her back/side. She will hiss and scratch/bite us when we try and get out the front door. I have scars on my hands from where she bit me so hard (stressed because my sister was visiting) that I had bruises for about a week. I'm afraid that something really terrible happened to her - like, someone did something to her - when we left her in Seoul, and now she is so emotionally damaged that she cannot function normally. We've tried everything, just absolutely everything we can think of. We're at the end of our rope. We are seriously considering euthanasia, and I'm devastated, but I don't know what else to do. We could never rehome her, she hates everyone but us (and sometimes even us) and it would be beyond cruel to take her to a no-kill shelter where she would live out her days terrified and alone. I'm making an appointment tomorrow to do a full clinical assessment to see if there is something - anything - that is making her ill that we can fix, which might be at the root of this. I suspect not, but it's one last thing to cover. If there is nothing physically wrong with her, I'm afraid the only thing we can do is put her down.
My problem is, I do love her so much. I've personally put in so much effort in trying to fix her, with therapy, diet change, drugs, research on behaviour - EVERYTHING! She is so cute and some days will cuddle up to you, and she still sleeps on me every night. But most days she will find at least one reason to act up and attack me or someone else. She is ruling our life and making it very difficult. A perfect example of her bizarre behaviour is this (100% true story by the way):
- Allie is yowling. I look for her to see what's wrong and see an empty water bowl. I fill it up and she runs over to drink. I give her a scratch behind the ears. She doesn't mind.
- I walk into the lounge room and lay down on the couch to relax (daughter is napping). Allie follows me and stares at my face with that wild look she gets. I know she wants to attack me. I try to diffuse the situation by speaking calming and moving my face away (don't want my eyes scratched). She jumps and bites my arm.
- I speak calmly saying "Allie, stop please. What's wrong?" in a soothing way. I see her twitching about to jump again and shield myself with a cushion. She bites me hard and I yell. Then it's on.
- She attacks my like a full-on feral cat, with the screeching and hissing and everything, the full works. I'm trying to defend myself and end up grabbing her by the scruff and tossing her into the bathroom. I leave her in there to decompress for half an hour before letting her out.
The thing is, I love her dearly, but these scenarios enrage me because I know there is literally nothing I did wrong to her. When I take a step back I just realise that she is mentally deranged.
Any advice? The prospect of euthanasia hurts but I don't know what else to do.
Thanks so much for reading my novel...
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