Seeking Advice on Taking Care of Neighbor's Cat

Let me start off by saying that I've only ever had (and will have) fully indoor cats myself. However, we live on a quiet side road without a lot of traffic and a neighbor down the road has an outdoor cat. When we first moved in in September, she wasn't too skinny and wasn't in that rough of shape. A couple of things have changed over the past months:

1. Now she's shedding like crazy (my husband thinks from malnutrition) and she is a bag of bones. I've been feeding her (along with another neighbor) on and off - when she's around - but she doesn't seem to gain weight, so I'm worried she might have intestinal parasites.

2. She is also is now covered in various sores. She's got bites all over her stomach from fleas and worrying at the bites. Her tail is all scabbed up underneath the thinning fur. And she looks to have an infected claw. Last week, I just started her on topical flea and tick treatment, so I'm hoping that the bites clear up, but I can't fix the claw in the current situation, so that brings me to...

What should I do? My husband and I are thinking we should take her to a vet to get checked out and the claw addressed (as well as potential parasites). We don't know whether or not she has a microchip, but it's incredibly obvious that she's not being taken care of. We do know that she's spayed though because she has a TNR ear clip. I don't think we'd be in the wrong to get her vet care, but what should we do after that? We can't keep her inside (two cats of our own) and I'm seriously conflicted. I hate seeing her so neglected and I'm sure her condition would just deteriorate again if she were left outside. However, she's not ours to rehome into a real family who loves her. I brought up sending the neighbors a letter with no return address about maybe taking better care of her (nicely written, I promise), but my husband said that if we do that before we get her taken care of, they might take her in to a vet and the cost of fixing the claw might be enough that they'd rather put her down. That's how neglected she is. We obviously don't want to happen.

I'm seriously leaning towards doing what I can myself, taking her to the vet to be fixed up further, and then returning her to the neighborhood. I'm not personally happy with that solution because I feel like it's not what's best for her, but I'm also trying to respect the fact that neglect or not, she's not mine. I'm not sure if I'm erring too much to one side or the other - either not respecting her owners enough or not doing enough for her, since she can't do for herself.

submitted by /u/gleetzoid
[link] [comments]

from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/hoer9c/seeking_advice_on_taking_care_of_neighbors_cat/