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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (21037)	4/26/1998 4:19:00 AM
From: LoLoLoLita	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Christine, My vet was equivocal about it, saying that he has "seen a few cases of problems," but that using it "would probably help" control the fleas. He also said that for some indoor cats, a flea collar alone can offer sufficient protection. You are very right about the health and safety benefits of keeping cats indoors. Aside from reducing infectious diseases and parasites, automobile accidents, falls, and dog bites are all vastly reduced risks when a cat is kept indoors. I would be surprised if the average life extension was only two years. It probably varies quite a bit, but it seems credible that there would be many locations where keeping cats indoors would result in doubling their life expectancy, say from 9 to 18 years. For highly urban areas, maybe a tripling or more. Cats are creatures of habit as i'm sure you are well aware. If someone were to decide to keep a cat indoors, this is probably best instituted when the cat is a kitten. Cats can become quite depressed when they feel deprived. Also, lack of exercise and consequent weight gain in sedentary indoor cats can lead to a host of problems. I could not do this to my cat. In fact, i find myself wholly unable to refuse him anything that he wants of me. All he has to do is go to the door and look out, and then look at me, and i am trained to stop whatever i am doing and let him out. If, five minutes later, he does the same thing on the outside of the door, the procedure is repeated. This happens throughout the day. My new job is being a doorman. Tina was homeless for several months before he adopted me. He had been living from November through January at the elementary school across from my former house in Albuquerque. It was a very cold winter. The cat's fur looked like the hair on a Rastafarian. He had run away from home, and was living on the tuna fish sandwiches and such that the school children would feed him, living under one of the trailers they used as temporary classrooms. The children put up a hand-drawn sign on a telephone pole in hopes of finding his owner, or a good home. The poster referred to the cat as "she." When I first took "Tina" to the vet for vaccinations and an examination, the vet failed to notice the presence of a scrotum or penis, and issued me a rabies tag and license that said the cat was an unneutered female. Adding insult to injury, she proceeded to lecture me on the need to spay "her" (ovariohysterectomy), saying, to counter my incredulity as to its need, that "if they opened her up and they were already out, they'd just sew her back up and everything would be fine--no big deal." This was for a cat that was obviously more than five years old, and had had the front claws removed! Well, i'll tell you more later. But that's how i've come to have a boy named Tina here. The other two cats (one of which i found as a stray in Maui) both were adopted into good homes in Albuquerque. David

To: Grainne who wrote (21037)	4/26/1998 7:04:00 AM
From: wlcnyc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

After all this, I am so glad my cats don't have fleas!! My persian Chad had fleas when I got him from the ASPCA and that was a real battle, but they haven't been a problem for 7 1/2 years now. Maybe living in NYC has something to do with it? Of course, with NYC comes other little pesky, insect problems!