FinnishLapphund
There's no cow on the ice
Several things have kept me away from internet for a few months, it began with that I was having trouble with the internet connection using a dongle, so I decided that I might as well have a little break and then other things happened that has kept me away. One of the reasons has fur and is black with some white... (Don't have a digital camera and I'm not handy with computers so sorry, no photos. Blaze, nose, half collar, paws and tummy is white and then there's a few white straws on other places.)
More than two months ago, when we were still in our summer house, we began having an obedience problem with my dogs when being out in the garden, suddenly it took them a while to realise that they had to come with us (oldest dog was just somewhat disobedient but for a dog that usually knows where I am better than myself, only that was out of character. One of the two young dogs was much better than her sister but then her sister has always had a tendency to have her head amongst the clouds).
But it was only one area of the garden that really made all three dogs become disobedient, in the far corner of the garden there is a shed nearby three large fir trees and there my dogs wandered around sniffing, looking and seemingly became temporarily deaf. This is where my stupidity comes in, I looked and saw that they had not found something eatable and thought it was just the smell from some wild animal passing through our garden that they felt the smell from (smaller animals than my dogs can get through the fence and roe-deers can jump over it) and my brain got stuck on the thought that we must be doing something wrong, maybe we wasn't enough interesting, funny or demanding or maybe the treats wasn't tasty enough.
Although we changed f.ex. the treats to pieces of real sausages, meatballs and similar, we still had "deafness"/slow reaction problems and I don't understand why that didn't make my brain wake up and realise that I should comb through the area with magnifying glass and toothbrush to see if I still couldn't find something that explained their interest but as the title says, I swear to trust my dogs better from now on.
Regardless of my intelligence failing me, it all had its explanation one Friday around noon when my father went into the shed to look for something and came and told us that he had found a kitten in the shed and I needed to come and catch it!
So I get the cat transport and only when we're almost about to enter the shed, then he chooses to tell me that the kitten is barely alive. And just a footstep in from the door, on top of/beside a piece of fabric and a few small pieces of wood I see a black fur with the hair standing up to get a little bigger isolation layer of air in between its fur and it had tried to bend in the head in under the body in a way that at first made me wonder if the head was stuck in the floor or something else.
Since I couldn't see any immediate signs of disease or injury I just scooped it up, put it in the transport and hurried indoors with it. It was only a heap of truly only skin and bones, very cold and barely breathing.
Luckily I'm an old fashioned girl, I have hot water bottles in both the city home and the summer home, so we put on water so that we could put the kitten beside the hot water bottle (we always have a towel laying with the bottle that we then can wrap it in). It just laid the way I had put it down and had a very slow breathing (I've had old dogs whose breathing could slow down when they slept deep but this was even slower than that).
I decided that we still had to try and give it some fluid but though it didn't object much, I doubt we managed to get more than a few drops down. I didn't wanted to bother it even with a quick look at the gender deciding area, without we just put it back next to the hot water bottle again and for a long a while it just laid the way we had put it down.
If you wonder why we didn't just put the transport in the car and went to the vet immediately, several things made us take it a little calm, f.ex. with only one car we had to make sure that there wasn't any more kittens anywhere in the shed that also needed to go to the vet. Besides the kitten simply seemed to cold to be taken out at once for a 30 minutes drive to the vet and to some part it also seemed wrong to take a wild kitten out on a car ride, when it still seemed like it might not be breathing by the time it got to the vet clinic.
Anyhow after a while I phoned "my" vet clinic and they said that since we are regular clients one of the vets would have a look at the kitten in between two other patients and we decided that if they didn't find anything wrong with it, they would do what they could for it (give fluid and such things but they don't keep patients over night) and we would keep it.
So by the time she came to the vet (yep, it was a little she that we had found), she had been lying next to a (wrapped in towel) hot water bottle for more than 1 and a half hour, almost two hours, and still when they tried to check her temperature the first thermometer only showed Low, they thought it meant the energy in the battery was to low and tried another thermometer from the same examination room, when it also only showed Low they went out and got a third thermometer from somewhere else in the clinic and it was only when this third thermometer showed Low that they realised it meant her body temperature was to low for their thermometers to measure! No wonder she was breathing slow and didn't react much.
Both me and the vet thought she was only about one month old, so not only had we found a very weak little kitten but also a too young kitten that still should have been in its mothers care. Why she was found so close to starving and freezing to death we can only guess (the mother stopped coming to feed for some reason/kitten wandered to far from the "nest") all we are sure of is that with a night temperature going down to 4 or 5 degrees (Celsius), she would not have survived the following night.
We got her home with special food and the instructions that she needed a calm surrounding during the weekend with a warm place to sleep and several tiny portions of food per day and then if she survived the weekend, she would maybe make it.
It hasn't been easy, she needed food but her intestines had big problems with any food coming that way. She needed to be wormed but was to weak in the beginning to be wormed and though you could still feel every bone in her body, her tummy puffed up until it looked like a barrage balloon. For the first week or two she slept much more than a normal, curious kitten and then we had the days with diarrhoea...
Cilla (meaning shadow and she was just a shadow of a cat when she was found) of course became more and more interested in socializing with our other pets when she was awake but the cats haven't been keen. I suspect that the 15 year old moggy still hopes that if she only pretends that Cilla doesn't exists for long enough, she will actually disappear and I can only describe the 4 year old Cornish Rex's reaction as "I'm scared to death, she's stolen all my toys and by the way I'm sure she has the plague...".
Thank goodness for my dogs. They most of the time put up with being ambushed and attacked, having a kitten attached to their face, legs, tail or gnaw bone. It happened more than once that while the dog was chewing on a bone, Cilla was trying to kill their tail or that she sometimes was trying to catch or even chew in one end of a gnaw bone, while a dog was chewing in the other end (they think she's old enough to know better by now but then they accepted or hurried out of her way).
But now, a riddle, who is it that sometimes crawls around searching through rooms while frantically rattling a cat toy?
Why are cats so good at finding places that I don't know exists in my own home (and thereby seem incapable of finding)? And it is not only themselves they hide in these for me "unfindable" (sorry, I know it's not a real word but I hope you understand its meaning) places, I try to regularly have a look around the house and pick up all cat toys I find and then I put them in a sort of small basket near the cat tree in the kitchen or maybe in the two cat trees in our living room but still I don't find/see some toys for days.
Admittedly sometimes they are gone for good, since one of the young dogs still have trouble remembering that cat toys aren't meant as dog toys but more often Cilla suddenly turns up playing with one of those missing toys some days later. But even if I go for a cat toy hunt as soon as I realise that she has stopped playing for now, I'm not always able to find the toy/toys I've just seen her play with.
So when I can't find the toys I worry that the dog has eaten them and at the two times when I haven't been able to find Cilla, I worried even more about what she might be doing and where. Though I do realise that sometimes she actually is innocently sleeping, it is just that I find that hard to believe, unless I can actually see her doing it. Actually even when I hear Cilla making/causing sounds that I shouldn't be hearing, as long as it doesn't sound really dangerous, I think I prefer that to not hearing her at all.
I'm quite sure that the starvation/maybe not being properly weaned, has affected her behaviour because every now and then she tries to dig over the food bowl (it happens less often now but there was a period when she did it almost always and regardless about if there was anything left or if it was empty) and every day she suckles on a special place on a dog rug.
Now she has the energy level of a normal kitten (or more) and it turns out that I'm not an as good cat owner as I thought. To only list a few things :
the fact that all my pot plants isn't "climbable" for cats, the number of pot plants that has fallen down in our house the last weeks has reached a level that has made me hesitate to water them because it has happened that a newly watered plant has fallen and it just makes it a bigger mess to clean up (on other hand not all of them falls, she managed to reach the top of one of my Ficus Benjamina trees and began aiming for something in the roof, before I saw her and climbed up on something and took her down).
The fact that not everything I own is suitable as cat toys.
The fact that not everything I do, I only do to amuse her.
The fact that my water-bowls aren't cat safe, when she is running around the house and accidentally happens to get a paw/leg in the water, she gets wet! (And usually it isn't only she that gets wet *sigh*.) Surely good cat owners have better water-bowls than that...
She has me under her paw, f.ex. like Pavlov's dogs she has taught herself to react on my alarm clock. She has realised that if she hurries when my alarm clock begins to ring, she can find me "awake" (I suppose technically I am briefly awake before I've managed to hit the snooze button) and believes I'm thereby capable of giving her breakfast, which has led to me having a food bowl close to my alarm clock, so that I can just remove the cover and put it in the other end of my bed where she can eat her breakfast, while I get my snooze.
So anyway, one of the reasons that has kept me away from internet is a kitten that has kept me very busy, first when being ill and needing lots of tending and later when being better she needs entertaining to not be to difficult for the dogs and cats, that no longer can jump up on things to hide from her...
But if it ever happens again that my dogs says that there is something more interesting than sausage in our garden, I swear to take their "word" for it and not give up until I've found/figured out what interests them.
More than two months ago, when we were still in our summer house, we began having an obedience problem with my dogs when being out in the garden, suddenly it took them a while to realise that they had to come with us (oldest dog was just somewhat disobedient but for a dog that usually knows where I am better than myself, only that was out of character. One of the two young dogs was much better than her sister but then her sister has always had a tendency to have her head amongst the clouds).
But it was only one area of the garden that really made all three dogs become disobedient, in the far corner of the garden there is a shed nearby three large fir trees and there my dogs wandered around sniffing, looking and seemingly became temporarily deaf. This is where my stupidity comes in, I looked and saw that they had not found something eatable and thought it was just the smell from some wild animal passing through our garden that they felt the smell from (smaller animals than my dogs can get through the fence and roe-deers can jump over it) and my brain got stuck on the thought that we must be doing something wrong, maybe we wasn't enough interesting, funny or demanding or maybe the treats wasn't tasty enough.
Although we changed f.ex. the treats to pieces of real sausages, meatballs and similar, we still had "deafness"/slow reaction problems and I don't understand why that didn't make my brain wake up and realise that I should comb through the area with magnifying glass and toothbrush to see if I still couldn't find something that explained their interest but as the title says, I swear to trust my dogs better from now on.
Regardless of my intelligence failing me, it all had its explanation one Friday around noon when my father went into the shed to look for something and came and told us that he had found a kitten in the shed and I needed to come and catch it!
So I get the cat transport and only when we're almost about to enter the shed, then he chooses to tell me that the kitten is barely alive. And just a footstep in from the door, on top of/beside a piece of fabric and a few small pieces of wood I see a black fur with the hair standing up to get a little bigger isolation layer of air in between its fur and it had tried to bend in the head in under the body in a way that at first made me wonder if the head was stuck in the floor or something else.
Since I couldn't see any immediate signs of disease or injury I just scooped it up, put it in the transport and hurried indoors with it. It was only a heap of truly only skin and bones, very cold and barely breathing.
Luckily I'm an old fashioned girl, I have hot water bottles in both the city home and the summer home, so we put on water so that we could put the kitten beside the hot water bottle (we always have a towel laying with the bottle that we then can wrap it in). It just laid the way I had put it down and had a very slow breathing (I've had old dogs whose breathing could slow down when they slept deep but this was even slower than that).
I decided that we still had to try and give it some fluid but though it didn't object much, I doubt we managed to get more than a few drops down. I didn't wanted to bother it even with a quick look at the gender deciding area, without we just put it back next to the hot water bottle again and for a long a while it just laid the way we had put it down.
If you wonder why we didn't just put the transport in the car and went to the vet immediately, several things made us take it a little calm, f.ex. with only one car we had to make sure that there wasn't any more kittens anywhere in the shed that also needed to go to the vet. Besides the kitten simply seemed to cold to be taken out at once for a 30 minutes drive to the vet and to some part it also seemed wrong to take a wild kitten out on a car ride, when it still seemed like it might not be breathing by the time it got to the vet clinic.
Anyhow after a while I phoned "my" vet clinic and they said that since we are regular clients one of the vets would have a look at the kitten in between two other patients and we decided that if they didn't find anything wrong with it, they would do what they could for it (give fluid and such things but they don't keep patients over night) and we would keep it.
So by the time she came to the vet (yep, it was a little she that we had found), she had been lying next to a (wrapped in towel) hot water bottle for more than 1 and a half hour, almost two hours, and still when they tried to check her temperature the first thermometer only showed Low, they thought it meant the energy in the battery was to low and tried another thermometer from the same examination room, when it also only showed Low they went out and got a third thermometer from somewhere else in the clinic and it was only when this third thermometer showed Low that they realised it meant her body temperature was to low for their thermometers to measure! No wonder she was breathing slow and didn't react much.
Both me and the vet thought she was only about one month old, so not only had we found a very weak little kitten but also a too young kitten that still should have been in its mothers care. Why she was found so close to starving and freezing to death we can only guess (the mother stopped coming to feed for some reason/kitten wandered to far from the "nest") all we are sure of is that with a night temperature going down to 4 or 5 degrees (Celsius), she would not have survived the following night.
We got her home with special food and the instructions that she needed a calm surrounding during the weekend with a warm place to sleep and several tiny portions of food per day and then if she survived the weekend, she would maybe make it.
It hasn't been easy, she needed food but her intestines had big problems with any food coming that way. She needed to be wormed but was to weak in the beginning to be wormed and though you could still feel every bone in her body, her tummy puffed up until it looked like a barrage balloon. For the first week or two she slept much more than a normal, curious kitten and then we had the days with diarrhoea...
Cilla (meaning shadow and she was just a shadow of a cat when she was found) of course became more and more interested in socializing with our other pets when she was awake but the cats haven't been keen. I suspect that the 15 year old moggy still hopes that if she only pretends that Cilla doesn't exists for long enough, she will actually disappear and I can only describe the 4 year old Cornish Rex's reaction as "I'm scared to death, she's stolen all my toys and by the way I'm sure she has the plague...".
Thank goodness for my dogs. They most of the time put up with being ambushed and attacked, having a kitten attached to their face, legs, tail or gnaw bone. It happened more than once that while the dog was chewing on a bone, Cilla was trying to kill their tail or that she sometimes was trying to catch or even chew in one end of a gnaw bone, while a dog was chewing in the other end (they think she's old enough to know better by now but then they accepted or hurried out of her way).
But now, a riddle, who is it that sometimes crawls around searching through rooms while frantically rattling a cat toy?
Why are cats so good at finding places that I don't know exists in my own home (and thereby seem incapable of finding)? And it is not only themselves they hide in these for me "unfindable" (sorry, I know it's not a real word but I hope you understand its meaning) places, I try to regularly have a look around the house and pick up all cat toys I find and then I put them in a sort of small basket near the cat tree in the kitchen or maybe in the two cat trees in our living room but still I don't find/see some toys for days.
Admittedly sometimes they are gone for good, since one of the young dogs still have trouble remembering that cat toys aren't meant as dog toys but more often Cilla suddenly turns up playing with one of those missing toys some days later. But even if I go for a cat toy hunt as soon as I realise that she has stopped playing for now, I'm not always able to find the toy/toys I've just seen her play with.
So when I can't find the toys I worry that the dog has eaten them and at the two times when I haven't been able to find Cilla, I worried even more about what she might be doing and where. Though I do realise that sometimes she actually is innocently sleeping, it is just that I find that hard to believe, unless I can actually see her doing it. Actually even when I hear Cilla making/causing sounds that I shouldn't be hearing, as long as it doesn't sound really dangerous, I think I prefer that to not hearing her at all.
I'm quite sure that the starvation/maybe not being properly weaned, has affected her behaviour because every now and then she tries to dig over the food bowl (it happens less often now but there was a period when she did it almost always and regardless about if there was anything left or if it was empty) and every day she suckles on a special place on a dog rug.
Now she has the energy level of a normal kitten (or more) and it turns out that I'm not an as good cat owner as I thought. To only list a few things :
the fact that all my pot plants isn't "climbable" for cats, the number of pot plants that has fallen down in our house the last weeks has reached a level that has made me hesitate to water them because it has happened that a newly watered plant has fallen and it just makes it a bigger mess to clean up (on other hand not all of them falls, she managed to reach the top of one of my Ficus Benjamina trees and began aiming for something in the roof, before I saw her and climbed up on something and took her down).
The fact that not everything I own is suitable as cat toys.
The fact that not everything I do, I only do to amuse her.
The fact that my water-bowls aren't cat safe, when she is running around the house and accidentally happens to get a paw/leg in the water, she gets wet! (And usually it isn't only she that gets wet *sigh*.) Surely good cat owners have better water-bowls than that...
She has me under her paw, f.ex. like Pavlov's dogs she has taught herself to react on my alarm clock. She has realised that if she hurries when my alarm clock begins to ring, she can find me "awake" (I suppose technically I am briefly awake before I've managed to hit the snooze button) and believes I'm thereby capable of giving her breakfast, which has led to me having a food bowl close to my alarm clock, so that I can just remove the cover and put it in the other end of my bed where she can eat her breakfast, while I get my snooze.
So anyway, one of the reasons that has kept me away from internet is a kitten that has kept me very busy, first when being ill and needing lots of tending and later when being better she needs entertaining to not be to difficult for the dogs and cats, that no longer can jump up on things to hide from her...
But if it ever happens again that my dogs says that there is something more interesting than sausage in our garden, I swear to take their "word" for it and not give up until I've found/figured out what interests them.
