I have a sick kitty. Poor Groucho went outside today and decided to use the empty stall where I’m storing grain for a litterbox. I fed the horses and came back to shut the door and he was still in there. Lightbulbs go off in my normally morning-addled brain so I pick him up and the ground is totally dry. Urethral obstruction. I bundle him up and take him to work with me. I think I caught it really early so his bladder wasn’t super full and he wasn’t sick. This made the other vet and I argue over the diagnosis for a while before I convinced him to my way of thinking and proceeded to fix him. So he’s in the hospital overnight. I put a note on his cage saying that he was nice and was not one of my devil-spawn barn cats.
People there cringe when they see me bring in a cat. One of my barn cats once climbed a picture window in the surgery suite to protest her imminent spay. Another was not caught before getting pregnant. I trapped her and her kittens and a client fostered them until they were old enough to get homes. That cat attacked that woman every day for 6 weeks until I spayed her and brought her back home never to lay hands on her again. I have one cat that I refer to as the salmon cat. She was born to an uncatchable barn cat here. She left after being weaned. She came back last spring to have her kittens. Then she left again. She came back last week. I can’t get within 50 feet of that cat. But she comes home to spawn.
