ill kitty
Well, my huge cat Greebo's been ill for the past 5-6 days. He has this cough, which is obviously troubling him, but there is nothing else - his lungs sound OK (I took him to the vet 3 times), he doesn't have a fever, he just coughs. Luckily, the antibiotics are helping - he now bugs me to get food, eats and drinks normally, etc.
I am writing this for another reason. The vet first gave him an antibiotics injection on our 3rd visit. He also gave me a pill, with the instructions of "Give him a quarter in the morning and evening for the next 2 days". At which point my hair stood on end - cats don't like being given pills, and when you have to deal with an 8 kilo monster (that's about 17-18 pounds), it's a real problem. I mean, I generally consider myself lucky if I get away with less than 3 scratches when it's me and my mom doing it, and it's almost impossible to give him a pill by myself.
Well, turns out the good people at Pfizer are making animal pills with a flavor. So rather than trying to stick a nasty, bitter, foaming pill down the throat of a fighting cat, all I had to do was mix the pill with some treats, and he ate it of his own accord. Yey for Pfizer!
I talked about it to my vet, and he said they do this with all the pills, but it also has a down side. Turns out he gave some pills to dog owners, who incautiously left them lying around, and their cat ate 4 - and it's lucky the cat survived, because with an overdose of that proportion there's risk of kidney failure - which is a problem with cats anyway. Well, morons will be morons. I mean, there cannot be a warning along the lines of "Keep out of reach of children" on every single medicine there is, and then you just leave the pills lying around for the cat to eat. Oh well.
Fun fact though - I decided to check out the Pfizer site. They have a hilarious, if slightly worrying division of product categories by type of animal - there's cat, dog, horse, swine, beef and dairy. There's obviously a difference in how you should treat cows for meat and for milk, but it still looks weird :)
I am writing this for another reason. The vet first gave him an antibiotics injection on our 3rd visit. He also gave me a pill, with the instructions of "Give him a quarter in the morning and evening for the next 2 days". At which point my hair stood on end - cats don't like being given pills, and when you have to deal with an 8 kilo monster (that's about 17-18 pounds), it's a real problem. I mean, I generally consider myself lucky if I get away with less than 3 scratches when it's me and my mom doing it, and it's almost impossible to give him a pill by myself.
Well, turns out the good people at Pfizer are making animal pills with a flavor. So rather than trying to stick a nasty, bitter, foaming pill down the throat of a fighting cat, all I had to do was mix the pill with some treats, and he ate it of his own accord. Yey for Pfizer!
I talked about it to my vet, and he said they do this with all the pills, but it also has a down side. Turns out he gave some pills to dog owners, who incautiously left them lying around, and their cat ate 4 - and it's lucky the cat survived, because with an overdose of that proportion there's risk of kidney failure - which is a problem with cats anyway. Well, morons will be morons. I mean, there cannot be a warning along the lines of "Keep out of reach of children" on every single medicine there is, and then you just leave the pills lying around for the cat to eat. Oh well.
Fun fact though - I decided to check out the Pfizer site. They have a hilarious, if slightly worrying division of product categories by type of animal - there's cat, dog, horse, swine, beef and dairy. There's obviously a difference in how you should treat cows for meat and for milk, but it still looks weird :)