Letters to the Editor
cdevlin
Published Letters: 157 Editor's Choice: 2
-
The answer isn't here....
[Read the article: I hate my cat!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No matter how many of us here relay our own similar experiences, we'll all come up short because they're not yours, and so it's going to be really difficult to extrapolate from one to the next.
My first response was, Three years? Three years isn't so bad. And many of the responses here are right on, it seems to me. I've had a lot of problem animals. I've agonized over whether to give them away, give them up, have them put down. In the long run, I've had to work really really hard to keep them, and you know what? It's been worth it. So far, I've never had to put an animal down for behavioral issues, but I'd never say for sure that it couldn't happen, because just as I believe there are some truly irredeemable people, I believe that in rare cases the same is true of some animals.
But that's a really young cat to give up on just yet. And you haven't even begun to explore some viable options. Which is not to say it won't be time consuming and that it won't feel hopeless and that many times you won't feel defeated. I took one beloved dog through three obedience classes before I began to trust she could be saved. And by the time she reached that point (part of which was simply growing older in addition to the truly long, hard work we did together), people who hadn't know her before couldn't believe she'd ever been such a monster.
Two of our dogs now are fine with people but can't abide in the same space without trying to murder each other, and so we live in a divided house, with gates separating them. On the one hand we're relieved knowing it won't be forever, and on the other hand we're pained knowing we won't have them forever because dogs' life spans are so woefully short. For the past eight years, we've lived with a divided house. And even reaching the decision to go that route was long and agonizing, and we worked several years beyond that to socialize them in other ways.
The past couple of years I've agonized over how to handle the stray cat who I know has fathered three of our boy barn cats and who has terrorized them repeatedly. I trapped him and took him to a shelter, retrieved him, gave him away (he came back), got him neutered (key), got after him over and over with a water bottle set on stun whenever I caught him in the act, and it's only the past couple of months I've been able to believe things actually will change. Tonight, they all gathered in the barn together around the food dishes, bumping noses and winding their tails around each other as if it's the way it's always been. And with each small step in that direction I'm of course relieved and surprised and hopeful.
Anyway, neutering by all means. And as someone else noted, the great outdoors does a cat a world of good. "Barn cat" of course means you have a barn where the cats come and go as they like and keep the mice at bay. And as a kid, growing up in a small town meant we let our animals come and go as they liked. I know the jury's out on that issue, but I think it might be a viable option for some cats. Maybe, after some other work, your cat.
Best of luck. Keep trying.
-
barn cats, etc.
[Read the article: I hate my cat!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It really is possible to have healthy barn cats. And many of us who keep barn cats not only provide cat-specific shelter for them in the actual barn (for us, in our tack room, complete with heat and comfy beds in the winter), and regular meals which they invariably show up for both morning and night, many of us make sure they receive necessary vet care, including shots and parasite meds and the like (as we do for the horses and the dogs). They tend not to wander very far. I'm assuming that's because we take really good care of them and pay quite a lot of attention to them. They're not anonymous strays who happen to live in some anonymous barn. They're my cats. We take regular walks together. Or, rather, when I take the very long walk down to my mailbox every day, or when my husband and I take walks without the dogs, the cats (usually all five of them) accompany us. I dunno. I suspect it's because they like us because we take good care of them and pay quite a lot of attention to them. Even though they live in the barn and are free to wander as they like.
As for coyotes, yes, we are surrounded by coyotes. I'm not convinced a coyote is much of a threat to a cat.