Liddle Lived a Short Time
This is not a story about an old cat becoming ill with no effective treatments available (such as the previous articles about Sole', Pablo, and Lynx). It is a story about the dangers that cats face throughout their lives. No matter how healthy, they can encounter something that makes them seriously ill. Whether indoor or outdoor, cat owners need to be on guard and try to cat-proof their environment to some degree.
Liddle loved the outside during all seasons
Indoor dangers mostly revolve around the various substances, foods, plants, medications, and chemicals that fill a normal human household. An extensive list can be found here. Outdoor dangers also revolve around poisonous plants, but also automotive fluids found in your garage, wild animals that inhabit the woods, vehicles that travel the roads, and many other things. You can read more about the dangers outside here and here.
Our cats go outside at times, and as you can see from the pictures, Liddle enjoyed his time outdoors to the fullest.
Liddle on the prowl
Liddle was a large cat (15 lbs, but not overweight) and he knew it. He wasn't very afraid of larger animals and once even chased a deer out of the yard. One of his favorite games was hide and seek. I would hide in the woods, he would come searching for me, I would jump out from behind a tree and chase him back into the yard where he would climb up a tree. When I went back into the woods he would come searching again...and again. He loved it.
Liddle was a stray that walked-up to my wife one day in a parking lot - lonely and hungry. We took him home and from day one he was friendly, energetic, and a good sibling to our other cats. In fact, the minute he met Jean Paul (another one of our cats), they took off running around an playing in the backyard together. He was probably our most popular cat among friends and acquaintances. As you can see from the pictures, Liddle liked to run around, climb trees and buildings, and generally spend a lot of time outdoors.
Hide and seek in the apple tree
To make a long story short - as short as his life - Liddle walked up to me one day outside with an odd meow and a strange look in his eyes. He seemed to be in some sort-of minor distress which gradually worsened over the next couple of days. On the third day, he laid in one spot without hardly moving, so we took him to an emergency clinic. They did a battery of tests but could not find anything wrong. He was given anti-inflammatory medication and that didn't seem to help. A couple of days later we took him to a different vet office and they could not find any obvious disease condition either but suggested antibiotics, which are the catch-all medication for mysterious illnesses in cats. For the next 36 hours, he continued to decline and eventually passed away. To me, it seemed like system-wide organ failure - probably a case of poisoning, but the diagnostics did not turn anything up. The second vet suggested perhaps a tangle with a wild animal which caused an infection in his nervous system. This was based upon a little swelling in his neck/jaw area late in the illness. If this was the case, then antibiotics early in the disease might have saved him.
Just chilling on the tree stump
We manage and monitor our indoor and outdoor environment to be safe for our cats but in the case of Liddle, we never found out what happened. If you do want to take your cat outside, a good way to make an the experience more safe is to use a cat harness and go for a supervised walk.
The tragedy is that Liddle was only six. Double or triple the years with this wonderful cat would have been ideal, of course. He was such a popular cat with our friends that they still ask about him to this day. It was another frustrating situation (like the stories Sole' and Lynx) where modern diagnostics and treatments could not help. Do not mistake this for criticism of any particular veterinarian. The science of pet care has advanced greatly in recent years. It is just a fact that diagnosing and treating animals is still not up to the same level as in humans. RejuveCat will help out the situation, funding the development of more effective treatments and diagnostics soon.
Do you have an indoor/outdoor cat? Do you keep your cats inside? Leave a comment about the best ways to monitor or manage hidden dangers.