Wow... what a difference love and good nutrition have made!

mackiemac

mackiemac

Slave in a cat house
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Best little cathouse in Texas
I was just looking at pictures Rain as she's grown up, especially post illness.

Here she was, 2 months ago recovering from a grand slam of Calicivirus, Bartonella, Giardia and Coccidia. We didn't think that she would survive. She looks pretty awful here, the day that we realized that she was going to make it after all. She had a very rough go, but she's a little fighter.

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And here she is now. Love works miracles.

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mackiemac

mackiemac

Slave in a cat house
Thread starter
Alpha Cat
Joined
Apr 13, 2016
Messages
400
Purraise
521
Location
Best little cathouse in Texas
Willow's Mom said:
Wow. That is truly amazing. She certainly is a happy, healthy, alert, and well cared for girl now. I'm glad you're doing Agility with her.
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She is having a lot of fun with it-- we introduced a new task this evening. She is learning about hoops. For her first hoop, I'm using an old bicycle tire. She wasn't so sure when I brought the tire in, but I let her investigate. When she got used to its presence, I thought I'd start off by just letting her step over it as I rested it on the floor. She looked at it, then at me, and the look was like, "I'm supposed to do... what?" Couldn't get her to step over so then I had the idea to hold up, resting on a hurdle and moved the target through. She looked at it like, "Oh! I get it!", and she went right up and through, several times. Then DH took the tube in hand and moved a few feet from the hurdle, and I moved the target along the course-- tunnel, to platform, to hurdle, to hoop, to chair... and she came right along. Smart kitten!

I saw the "best little cat house in Texas" location.Are you familiar with the "Chicken Ranch"?
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LOL, only from the movie and the ZZ Top song...'La Grange'

Rain is a very attractive cat! And you made a tremendous effort to save her!

How did she come to you?
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We adopted her (rescued her) from an overpopulated, low-resource rural kill shelter in southern Dallas County (City of Lancaster). Unfortunately, it's a sort of "death row" kind of place. We were looking to adopt a new gray cat after our 17 year old gray longhair girl, a Birman mix named Skye passed away in July. After many unanswered applications and numerous instances where the foster families decided to keep the kitties, and several foul-ups at out own city's shelter, and several other instances where a pet was supposedly available when I called but when I got to the shelter that same day, I found out that they were already spoken for... and one instance where the ad from a large "no kill shelter" didn't specify that the available cat was not good with other cats, or with most people, AND was FIV positive... I was surfing Craigslist. I saw a listing from someone who was probably either a volunteer or a concerned citizen for the city. She posted that there was a kitten overpopulation. One pictured kitten was a longhaired gray kitten, and DH and I just had to check her out. In a dark, dingy cage, in a dark and dingy shelter room where lots of puppies and kittens lived in cages along a damp and dreary wall, was one cage with two kittens inside... a brown mackerel tabby and white kitten, and the longhaired gray one. The shelter officer brought her out to us... and she just went limp like a Slinky in our arms, and purred like a miniature diesel truck. It took us a whole minute to decide that yeah, we'll take her home. So, we filled out the papers, paid the $15 adoption fee, and she was ours.

On the way out to the Jeep, as we walked her out in the carrier... she peeped at us for the very first time, a tiny, sweet , mild sounding little peep that just melted our hearts! And dang it, it still does even though she's getting her more grown up voice... she still uses her baby peep when she wants to wear us down and make us crack! She also has the whole natural cat vocabulary of trills, twitters, chirps and other little cat sounds beyond the single "meow" that our others used so much. She uses ALL her words! I knew that cats made many more sounds besides "meow" and "HASS!", but our others so seldom used those sounds that it's quite different to hear the other natural sounds in a cat's repertoire.

We don't really know how she came to the shelter, where she and her litter mates were born or found, or anything about her mother and father. We think it's the common story in a rural area... probably a semi-feral barn cat, or more likely some feral out on the loose. Probably not even a stray that some family was feeding somewhere, but a poor momcat having to fend for herself, because Rain is still pretty wild sometimes. Oh, she's very well socialized to us and other humans now, but her hunting behavior... her inquisitive nature, her "wild side" all make us think she was destined to be yet another feral cat, making more feral cats, until someone saved her from that fate and took her to shelter. But that shelter is a short-time, overcrowded place with no real foster program at all. She was basically on death row for real.

Then her luck continued, and she got adopted. Good thing-- because had she gotten sick in that place, like she did at our house, she would have died either through the illness itself, or through euthanasia. The illness was rough on her, we didn't even know if she was going to make it. Her fever almost hit 106 degrees. That's scary high. But we did heroics with fluids, cool environment (calculated risk), syringe feeding, holding her and talking to her and giving medicines and gallons of love all at home and after a week, she began to recover. She stood up on her hind legs in the laundry basket where we had her in our bedroom, and she was peeping loudly for her breakfast! Eight days after showing her first clues that she was getting sick-- it all started with what we and the 24 hour vet clinic thought was a sprained paw that she wouldn't walk on-- she was back to going after her "Ball In A Circle" and playing in her tunnel. This, after not being able to walk normally for a week! She recovered, and she is our little Fur Slinky!
 
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