...clearly he has learned nothing

[sciatrix]

So about a month ago, my small trash cat Arthur Dent abruptly stopped eating and gave us all a scare: he normally vacuums up food and, sometimes, non-food items with glee. (When he was much smaller, he gnawed through a bag in the hopes of tasting bokashi bran.) We took him to our vets, they X-rayed him, and determined that he had eaten a whole mess of hair ties, a couple of shoelaces, and "a partridge in a pear tree."

He wound up needing to go under emergency so that the vet could get all his horrible treasures out of his stomach. They filled up about a quarter of a gallon freezer bag--my vet techs understand that we are exactly the kind of macabre weirdos who want to see all the things they extracted from our horrible kitten--which is pretty impressive, given that Dent is a very small cat to begin with and could probably fit in one of those freezer bags himself without much trouble.

Anyway. That was then, this is now, and surely the experience might teach him to be more careful about the things he puts in his mouth?

...apparently not, because I just looked across the room and found him puking up a small pile of novelty erasers. This is after I have spent the last couple of weeks hunting for kitty chew toys in the vain hope that I can entice him to put more appropriate things in his horrible little mouth--he clearly has opinions about juuuuust the right level of squish to firmness--but I think he swallowed most of them whole.

Goddammit. I think I officially have a pica cat.

Monster.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

I had that with Nimitz. It was the scariest experience. She seems to have outgrown it, luckily. The younger cat also eats trash, but basically only cardboard shreddings from their cat scratcher, and those are less terrifying to humans.

Hugs.

[sciatrix]

Yeaaaah, Dent is about eighteen months old now and has been desirous of Interesting Mouth Feels for most of his life. I'm pretty sure he's bored. I hope he's bored, because bored I can probably do something about....

[notasupervillain]

Bored we fixed for Nimitz by adopting a second cat for her to boss around and play with. Surprisingly, it solved more problems than it caused.

I'd count anything under two years as still a baby. Might still grow out of it!

[sciatrix]

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah, there's actually a total of five cats in the house (our three, and then each of our two roommates have one cat), and two of them are thrilled to wrassle him as hard as he wants.

The problem is that both of them are experiencing increasingly frustrating behavior problems--scent marking and trying to kill the scent marker respectively--that have led to both of them getting exiled to their owners' rooms for the moment. We're working on that, too, but having both Spock and Tiberius currently in kitty iso makes me low key worried for what Dent is going to do next. And he can't be in either of their rooms because he's known to rifle through my roommates' stuff in search of things to swallow...

(Dent himself is literally the only cat in the house that gets on with everyone else 100% of the time, bless his heart. As it is, I'm looking very much forward to ironing out the Cat Drama with the roomies' two sometime after Spock goes to the dentist and everyone gets a clean bill of health.)

[notasupervillain]

Oh no. That's not good for anyone. I've never had to deal with that (this is my first time having even two cats in the same house) but good luck on getting it sorted!