Post Punk Kitchen Forum

I woke up the other day to this weirdly huge upside down u shaped scratch on the middle of my forehead. Musta been my evil cat Kristofferson, who likes to sleep on my pillow. Or it might have been me.

i wake up with mystery wounds all the time, mostly on the backs of my legs or around my face (or on my arms or hands, which are usually somewhere near my face while i'm sleeping). my cat has night terrors or something and runs and swats in her sleep, and she tends to sleep on either my knees or my head. it's always fun to discover a four-inch gash i didn't know i had while i'm taking a shower. right now i have two big claw marks on my neck and a lumpy bruise by my wrist.

I ended up with my parents diabetic cat. They kept my sister's dog and the dog stressed the cat out too much, so I took her home with me. She's pretty cute and has a paw that kind of looks like a lobster claw. So now I have 7 cats. Just start calling me Elanor Abernathy.

The bad kitty part comes in because I don't think Chewie is too happy with the new addition. He took a huge dump on my living room floor and he's never done that before.

I think my cat is doing bad behavior on purpose - she always sleeps in my bed except on the weekends, because the guy I'm seeing stays over and he's allergic to them. I've now discovered 2 weekends in a row poop and pee right outside of the clean litterbox and am pretty sure that's the reason why. I haven't any idea how to fix it.

Minnie has gained a bit too much weight so we had to cut down the dry food a bit, and the other two are rebelling. Beebee is destroying any paper we happen to leave within her reach (which she did occasionally before, but now it is way worse). Bing is waking us up at ungodly hours of the morning. Ugh.

Maybe she is stressed that she's been shut out of the bedroom? She's lost eight hours of one-on-one comfort time with you. A great cat stress reliever is play time. I'd try playing with her more with a string toy or laser pointer. Or even the crunchy toss game...toss edible treats across the room so she can run and pounce on them. Get her moving and out of her head. If you can get the guy to play with her with the laser pointer, even better. Also, be sure she gets enough to drink -- make sure her water is fresh and maybe even offer her unsalted chicken broth.

I really don't believe that cats poop and pee in inappropriate places just to get back at us.

Thanks for your suggestions, quagga! I'll definitely try them.

Jane did not move well. She hides under my bed during the day and is up all night yowling. I am calling the vet today to see if there isn't something that will help her. We all need sleep.

Penny's got a vendetta against rolled paper products. We have to keep the TP hidden and the bathroom doors closed. But apparently the paper towels aren't safe either. Bad kitty!



...and she likes to be in the Christmas tree. Here, she's 4 feet up in the branches of our 8-foot tree.

Oh, and I made curried noodles with veggies the other night and left the lid off the pan. 30 minutes later, there was cauliflower all over the kitchen floor. That was Penny. She's got a thing for curry.

Simon opened one of DH's collectable GI-Joe's... got it out of the package... and beat it up.

Also, nobody pees in peace anymore. The cats know how to open the bathroom door.

Bad, bad kitties!

And Simon jusy pooped on the bed. Again.

Oh gosh, AlwaysHungry, that picture of Penny in the tree is priceless. My ginger cat liked to nap in the tree the one year we got a real one.

My cat, Callie, has become an even pickier eater than she had been previously. In December, this got to the point of her having hepatic lipidosis and spending a week at the vet (goodbye, $1000!). They got her to eat the Purina DM canned food, and she was doing pretty well on that, no problems. Well, we went to my parents' house for a couple of weeks over the holidays and she decided she LOVED the Purina One Beyond dry cat food and was hoovering it down, to the point of her eating probably twice what my mom's 15 lb cat does. She put on ~1lb during this time.

Well, last Tuesday, she threw up a hairball, followed by what looked like slightly foamy saliva a few times. She decided that all cat food = gross after that. I've been able to get her to take a nibble here or there, but not enough to get her to continue putting on weight or even maintain her current weight. I took her to the vet on Friday and they gave her a shot of famotidine and something for nausea, and said that should help. Well, she's still not really eating. I noticed yesterday that while my partner was eating a sandwich, she was really eye-ing it and getting all up in his bidniss, so I decided to give her a little bit of his deli meat chicken... I know, gross!, but I was just trying to see if she was being picky or if she was put off of ALL food. She gobbled it up. So she's just being picky. Obviously, I can't keep feeding her deli meat because of sodium and the fact that she'd develop vitamin deficiencies, so...

What the hell do I feed this damned cat so that she won't go into liver failure? Aghhhh! BAD KITTY. EAT ONE OF THE 5 DIFFERENT FOODS I HAVE PUT OUT IN BOWLS RIGHT NOW!

Freetahtah, do you have a microwave? have you tried warming her food a little? sometimes that makes it easier for the cat to smell the food, and that can make it more enticing. i had to do that for ophelia for a while when she was recovering from pancreatitis. some cats are really into meat-based baby foods, too, and you can use them if all else fails, but they aren't ideal in the long term because of the vitamin deficiencies you already mentioned.

also, not to be alarmist, but the fact that she ate something exciting like deli meat while refusing regular food doesn't mean she doesn't feel sick; it just means she doesn't feel too sick to pass up a great treat. is that hairball the only time she's thrown up recently? is everything else normal?

acr, I did try warming up the wet food for a few seconds in the microwave, but she wasn't interested. She only threw up the hairball/spit in like a 2 hour period of time last Tuesday, but then she did it again on Friday morning (no hairball this time, just the Purina DM wet cat food I fed her for breakfast and then the spit stuff again), which is why I took her to the vet. The vet seemed to think that her vomiting the hairball caused esophagitis because of the stomach acid, so that's why she gave her the kitty Pepcid and anti-nausea meds, but she didn't seem to think there was anything deeper going on. So, it could just be that her esophagus is still bothering her and that's why she doesn't want to eat. The only reason I was thinking that she was being picky is that this morning she was sitting at her food dish, and then she'd sniff her food, then give me sad eyes, sniff her food again, etc. I'm not an expert in cat-communications, but it seemed like she was saying, "I'm hungry, but this food sucks, what else ya got?" Foods offered to her: Fancy Feast wet food (she might have eaten a few bites of this morning's flavor, nothing significant), Simply Nourish dry food, Simply Nourish canned stews, Innova dry, Purina DM canned, Wellness Core canned (various), Purina One, Purina One Beyond (both flavors)...

I'm thinking I might should head to the store at some point today and pick up some Meow Mix or other lower quality food that cats usually go nuts over to see if she'll go for that. Urgghhh. I'll also try calling the vet to see if they have any better ideas.

My 2 cats are currently not getting along. One has a chunk out of her tail, and I'm not sure if the other cat did it or if she self-mutilated because she's been so stressed. She hides under the side table all day long and has started pooping/peeing outside the litterbox (clean litterbox, has her own). I'm going to take her to the vet, but for the night have separated the 2, and am staying with the aggressive cat shut in my bedroom while she has free range of the rest of the apt, yet she's meowling outside my door. I don't know what to do. If I let the other cat out, they'll fight like they have been doing the last month.

Dear Emy,

I know that you get bored in the middle of the night, but that is what your scratch lounge and catnip toys are for. I'm having a hard enough time sleeping as it is right now, and I really, really do not want to have to "rescue" you from the closet or stop you from scratching at the wall (seriously cat, what the fizzle? there are plenty of things for your to scratch that don't sound as loud in my room!) at 3 am.

Sincerely, Mommy

(Also, if you can manage to squeeze yourself into the closet through the tiny opening you somehow managed to make, you can get yourself out of the closest. I have seen you do this a thousand times, rescue yourself damn it!)


ScooterDiva, have you thought about trying Feliway? It's a pheromone diffuser thing that is suppose to help a lot with stress. Maybe try that? Sorry your kitties aren't getting along! Emy and her sister occasionally decide to try to start WWIII, I know how stressful feuding cats can be :(

My cat Brian was getting so skinny because wasn't eating so I looked at her gums which were pretty horrible and decided she needed to see a vet for bad gums. I fed her half a can of tuna which was soft enough not to bother her gums. The next morning jdfunks woke me up and said there was an accident and that she needed my help. Brian had horrible tuna diarrhea all over the top of a bookshelf she was on. jd had to give Brian a shower because she was covered in poop. The walls were covered in poop. jd needed me because she was too short to reach the ceiling which was splattered with poop. (AND STUCCO so yeah that was awful) Then her vet appt was a couple hours later and her gums turned out to be totally fine. (I guess all cats' gums look that weird?) She wasn't eating initially because she hates jdfunks' cats. Anti-anxiety medicine helped her a lot.

Definitely try Feliway. We have two diffusers in the house, and it absolutely helped Simon to stop freaking on Penny when she came into the loft.

When Penny was new to the house, Simon hated her fiercely. They fought a LOT. But we made a lot of headway at food-time. First snack of the day was a teaspoon of tunafish for each of them on a separate plate, and each day we moved the plates a little closer. By Day 7 they each ate their portion off the same small plate at the same time. They got a tuna snack several times a day to promote good feelings associated with being together. After a week they were eating all their meals peacefully side-by-side. Kitties will always love tunafish more than they hate eachother.

Penny ate panko mushrooms off the counter last night! BAD KITTY!

But oh man she's so darn cute.

So the cat isn't really *bad* but with my dogs out of town, I have recently discovered that my princess of a cat has stinky toots. At least she does today. I always blamed all the stinky toots on the puppy. Poor puppy.

Is there a bad human thread? I accidentally shut Millie in the garage last night. She's got schmutz on her face that won't come off, and my husband's car is covered in paw prints.

My kitties somehow managed to shove their toy down the cast iron grate that covers the heat register in the floor of our bedroom, which is on the third floor of our house. It was one of the Cat Catcher wand toys, with the plastic wand, long metal wire, and mousie on the end. I have no idea how they managed to get the entire thing down a less than 1" square hole.

Then they managed to pull the grate off to the side a few inches to try and get it back out. Determined kitties!!! That thing is really heavy! But I'm sorry kitties, it's a straight 3-story drop from that grate to the furnace. That mousie isn't coming back.

Momo has taken to waking us up every morning by rapidly batting our window shades, or leaning up and scratching his nails along the wall. Bad kitty. Smart, bad kitty.

I love Momo's name.