Her name is Lizzy and she is a family cat we had adopted from a rescue shelter a couple years ago. We don’t know her exact age, but we believe she is a couple years past middle aged, or even older. All we know is that she isn’t young, but doesn’t seem to be too old either.
Not long ago after we moved across country to a new home, she started to lose a lot of weight and she developed an issue with her jaw where it lock or seem to kind of spazz , (the motion could be compared to a dog trying to eat peanut butter) whenever she tried to eat. We took her to the vet and they discovered the issue with her jaw had created an abscess. We got a shot that cleared the abscess, but for a while we were worried her jaw would never stop locking and spazzing while she would try to eat. It caused her great pain and kept her from eating, and we were worried we wouldn’t be able to save her and may have to put her down. But thankfully, the issue with her jaw stopped and the abscess went away.
But with that bit of back story aside, we have been spending the last few weeks settling into our new home. Lizzy’s weight hasn’t changed, although we had been trying to feed her some new wet food to help her gain some more weight, she won’t always finish it and her weight has stayed very much the same. (She feels very bony, such as her spine, and you can also see her hips more visibly. She also has some hair loss, such as her tail and lower back)
But other than that, she had seemed to have been doing quite well and normal given the circumstances and we felt like she was getting better.
Though there has been one thing she has been doing in our new house that she hasn’t done before, and that is that she’s been constantly trying to jump up on the bathroom/kitchen counters and drink from the sinks. She’s been doing it a couple times a day and she is fully aware of the ‘no cats on the counter rule’. (In our old house she hardy got on the counter)
We keep two water dishes on the ground for her, both of which we clean out regularly to make sure it’s fresh, but it doesn’t seem to matter to her, because all she wants is the water from the sinks. Considering she hadn’t done this before, we consider it very strange behavior from her to be jumping on the counter on the daily right in front of us.
Tonight we discovered she had peed in a bed, and my mother is now at the brink of sending Lizzy off to the shelter. She believes Lizzy has turned into an asshole cat who peed because she was pissed off for some reason. (Whether it be the new home, her not being allowed in the sinks, or the litter box location change) and states “once a cat pees in the home all love for that cat is gone and they get taken to the shelter”
Either that, or she believes perhaps Lizzy is not getting better and perhaps she can not control her bladder, but she believes it’s more likely that she did it on purpose, and that even if that’s not true we can’t afford anymore vet bills for her if she is sick .
She’s been quite harsh about the whole ordeal, but I do know she’s been really stressed out over things in the new home, but I know she would be willing to give Lizzy the boot rather than risk her peeing outside the box again.
I don’t agree with my mom on just throwing Lizzy out because of this. So I came here with my story with hopes of finding solutions to help Lizzy. Because obviously something is wrong with her,and I don’t want to just throw her out because I don’t feel like we truly know why Lizzy has been acting so unlike herself lately. She’s always been a good cat aside from being an occasional stinker, but asshole is not something I would call her.
I don’t want to see her thrown in a cage for the rest of her life because of this. I understand how unlikely it is that an older cat will be adopted again, and the thought of that just makes me so sad.
After I post this I’m going to go do some research on this and see if I can find any ways to understand what’s happening with Lizzy to help and to convince my mom to keep Lizzy in our family, but I just wanted to post here and see if anyone had any helpful information or experience on this that could help me understand Lizzy’s behavior and find ways to help her. I don’t want her to live the rest of her live alone and abandoned in a shelter somewhere again.
Thank you so much for your time
[link] [comments]
from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/cny7fz/my_mom_is_on_the_edge_of_abandoning_our_family/
No comments:
Post a Comment