Yesterday morning when I got up I was surprised to see a little bundle of yellow feathers on the kitchen floor and thought uh-oh, Sylvester finally got Tweety. Closer inspection revealed some legs, wingtips, a tail and the head of a lovebird. Lovebirds are native to Africa and although winters are cold here, many escaped birds survive happily, unless caught by a cat...
I'm so cute and I'll hug you, even though I have an insatiable appetite for birds
I'm not sure whether Peanut actually caught the Lovebird, I suspect this guy
It's cold and I am curled into the roundest cat-ball: why would you accuse me?
Toffee is an ace at catching unwary sleeping bids in the mulberry tree at night and he brings them inside but doesn't usually eat them. Peanut happily does the honours. In between eating locusts and anything else he can get his paws on.
I sighed and deposited the remains in a corner for later disposal and went to work. When I got home, I found the leftovers had been snacked on and all that remained was a little red beak and some feathers. The dude was too stuffed to eat much breakfast and then got hungry. Sigh...
The good news is that Tom is still eating fairly well so perhaps he just had a passing virus or something but at least his kidney problems have been identified.
Miss P on the other hand remains a conundrum: I got her to the vet and there wasn't much to go on, apart from mycoplasma visible on the blood smear, a slight anaemia and pain around her pelvis.
Mycoplasmas are unicellular organisms similar to bacteria that are normally found in cats and don't always cause disease, in fact they are considered commensals. A commensal is an organism, usually bacteria, that lives in relationship with another organism and gets food or other benefits without hurting or helping it. The bacteria which live in our intestines are an example of commensals. Cats can get sick from mycoplasma if they are stressed or have issues with immunity. The vet said he thought that perhaps she has Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV). There's a blood test for that but we didn't want to stress her further. The other reason besides the slight anaemia that made him think that is her pain in the pelvis. It didn't seem connected to her joints but more like a neuropathic pain, which is also associated with FIV. FIV is a lentivirus in cats that also destroys the cat's immune system over time but is unrelated to HIV, nor is it transmissible to humans. It's spread among cats through deep penetrating bites and is normally carried by tomcats but there was an incident a few years ago when she was badly bitten by a visiting tomcat who thought he'd like to mount her, even though she's been spayed.
She got an injection of painkillers and a 14-day course of antibiotics to get the mycoplasma infection under control. She has slowly started eating more but still not that much. When I discussed all of this with my usual vet, she said we should let her complete her treatment and wait and see. Having A FIV diagnosis won't actually change much, the main thing is to see how her health and quality of life progresses.
Hopefully my cats lives will be a little less dramatic for a while and my pocket can recover. It's been an expensive and stressful 2 weeks.