On caring for partially wild kitties…

February 13, 2006 | My Diary | By: Mark VandeWettering

It’s now 4:04AM on Monday, and I’m up, typing on my laptop.

Not by choice, mind you. Like most people, I have 40 hours to put in over the next week, and like most people I don’t get enough sleep as it is. But Scrappy is a handful during the night.

You see, he’s still really a feral cat. This means two things:

  1. He’s active at night.
  2. He wants to be outside. A lot.

I’m supposed to keep him quiet and not have any serious exercise, but I’m also supposed to keep him inside. These two goals are simply not compatible. I went to bed about midnight, and slept until about 1:30AM. Then, he started banging his head against my bedroom door. So, I placed him in the downstairs bathroom. Whereupon he urinated all over everything, tore stuff off the wall, and generally had every panic reaction you could imagine.

Now, it’s 4:08AM, and while I’m downstairs on the couch, he seems content (for the moment) to rest at the foot of the couch. I’m hoping it lasts for a couple of hours. Maybe I’ll try to learn something more about Asterisk, and pray for the sun to come up.

I’m supposed to take him to the vet at 9:00. They are supposed to remove his drains and then I can take him home, but frankly if I can’t let him go outside, I’m going to have to have him boarded for a couple of days, for his sanity and mine.

Okay, just for mine really. He’s now crying once every couple of minutes, and the funny thing is, I understand exactly. Neither of us is having the night that we want to. I hope he’s better soon.

Comments

Comment from Erin
Time 2/13/2006 at 9:13 am

My empathies. We adopted a wild cat with a broken hip but a lot of spunk.

If it helps, he’s healed enough now to get himself from the floor to the top of the refrigerator. This too, shall pass.