LostWoods Blog

It’s been a challenging week here at LostWoods. It started over the weekend with Allegra, followed by her brothers, getting upper respiratory infections. Allegra had some eye involvement with it, but the boys just had the sneezes and sniffles. I added l-lysine to their food and Allegra was getting eye meds. (She was just thrilled with that — not!) By Monday everyone except Fayne was doing better, but they were all getting a decongestant to help clear up the sniffles. Fayne wasn’t bad, but he was more congested than everyone else, so I added an antibiotic to his treatment.

In the meantime, Natane started sneezing and coughing. I thought it was just her coming down with the same thing as the kittens. When she showed NO signs of improvement I put her on the decongestant and antibiotic, too.

Tuesday night I thought all four kittens were better. Corliss and Allegra were nearly 100%. Seely was still sneezy. Fayne was still more congested than everyone else, but active, playful, and acting “normal.”

Wednesday comes along… Natane was obviously not better. In fact, she was refusing to eat and rarely moved from the bathroom except to cough. She was breathing out of her mouth and I started to wonder if she had pneumonia. She didn’t have the same symptoms as the kittens — no sniffles. No watery eyes. No discharge from her nose. Just lethargy and coughing.

Fayne, too, had regressed and was less active than normal. He was still eating, but he sounded more congested and acted less like the happy kitten he usually is.

Off to visit Dr Jennifer. Fayne was running a temp and was given sub-q fluids. We discussed switching antibiotics and decided to see how he was this morning. The good news today is that Fayne’s temperature was normal this morning and he’s once again a bouncing baby boy cat.  

More good news is that Natane, too, is better today. The bad news is she has asthma. She received fluids, a steriod and a bronchodilator yesterday at the clinic and came home with me. We’ll be working to figure out what it takes to keep her in a stable, healthy state over the next few months, although she’ll probably be on some level and combination of medications for the rest of her life and I’ll keep emergency meds around in case she has an attack in the future. 

When we got home yesterday she was already feeling a bit better, willing to walk around and drinking on her own. She was sitting up watching what was going on in the house rather than just lying on the floor looking miserable. This morning she had gone downstairs by herself and came to get a cat treat when I gave everyone treats.  She’s a pain in the rear end to get pills down, but she will get used it eventually. (I hope…) Whatever it takes, we’ll be giving her the best life we can despite the asthma.

Now you’re probably wondering — like I did — how common asthma is in cats. I haven’t done a lot of reading (yet!) but what I’ve seen so far says it’s about 1 in a 100 cats. Some suggest that the prevalence is increasing (in cats and humans) due to environmental pollutants. According to one reference I saw Siamese and Himilayans seem to have a slightly higher incidence.  One site you might want to visit if you’re interested in this topic is http://www.felineasthma.org/. I’ll add it to my links on the blog, too.

I hope when I get home Natane will be even better this afternoon. I am glad that Jeremy is home a good part of the time right now so someone is with her. Jeremy likes Natane a lot (even though he won’t admit it) and has been very concerned about her. So I feel fairly certain that if she were to have a problem he’d notice and let me know right away. Until she’s more stable, I’ll be nervous about leaving her alone for long.

In much happier news, I was seeing pink last week — and I don’t just mean Allegra’s eyes. Kefira is pregnant! Babies are due around August 8th. Yes, the kitten cam will be back. I know that all you addicts out there can hardly wait to get your fix.

And to wind this up for now, here’s a picture of Corliss. After all the time I spent with this little guy feeding him those first two weeks, he’s my special little boy. He has a home in Missoula and will be leaving in a little over a week. I’ll be even more sad than usual. For once, I’m admitting I have a favorite in the litter. Although, I’ve also got to say, this litter is so cuddly and loving that it’s going to be really hard to let any of them go. Good thing there will soon be new babies to distract me. Anyway, here’s my Corliss cutie.

Today’s post is sorta boring unless you’re another breeder or just interested in random stats. But I’ll post it here anyway.

I’ve been catching up on all my kitten paperwork, pictures, etc. and finally got around to entering the handwritten kitten weight charts into the spreadsheet on my computer. I keep a Excel workbook with a page for each litter. For each kitten in the litter I weigh them daily for a while, then switch to weekly weighing until they reach 14-16 weeks. I now do daily weigh ins for the first two weeks, but in the beginning I just did it for the first week. I also added in a 12 hour check several litters ago. Now and then, I miss a week because I’m gone — or because it got done at the vets’ office that week and I never wrote it on my chart at home. But for nearly every kitten, I have 14 weeks of growth data.

One thing a breeder should be doing is learning about (and, if you’re somewhat obsessive like me, recording) is how the lines she is working with develop and mature. So I not only track litters, but the overall development of the litters in comparison to other litter with the same mother. I should go back and do it by the father, ’cause that would also be interesting to me, as well. Then I compare the overall averages between different lines.

One thing that I’ve found is that birth weight in and of itself is not an indicator of eventual size. Bria’s and Kefira’s kittens are bigger than Shira’s on average. Kali’s are the smallest. Yet in talking with the owners of kittens after the kittens have matured, Bria’s and Kefira’s kittens have grown slower and are mostly smaller as adults than Shira’s or Kali’s. (Although, in both Kali’s and Kefira’s cases we’re only seeing kittens at a year old so far. ) I also find that a weight at 14 weeks can be an indicator of eventual relative size,  but not an absolute.

One always has to be careful drawing too many conclusions from an average or looking at data in isolation. In Kali’s case, her first litter was large (8 kittens born, 7 surviving) and that’s a big litter for any cat. It stands to reason that they were all on the small side. The biggest of Kali’s first litter was under the average for all the litters combined. But he is not smaller than average now. But that litter, with their low birth weights and slower growth, has brought down the stats overall for Kali’s litters. Talia had three litters of only two kittens among her litters – and those kittens thrived and grew quickly. But Talia is also the biggest of my breeding females, so I’d expect her kittens to be the largest of the bunch. I think her litter stats are a combination of smaller litters (part of the time) and a larger mother.

Anyway, just some musing on kitten growth, weights, and lines. And, perhaps, a little bit of insight into how my mind works!

By the way, if you’re a regular reader of the blog, you know that my main reason for weighing kittens has more to do with health monitoring than tracking trends or lines. If you’re not a regular reader, here’s the reasoning behind that. Kittens can’t talk and tell us when they don’t feel great. Oh, they tell you in non-verbal ways like throwing up or having diarrhea, but sometimes those signs aren’t present and yet a kitten may not be thriving. Especially in the early weeks when kittens mostly eat and sleep, it can be tough to tell by looking if a kitten is doing well.

Some breeders never weigh their kittens. They say, “I can tell by the way the kitten ‘feels’ if he or she is doing okay.” And to a certain extent, that is true. I’m a firm believer in handling kittens a lot and paying to your gut feeling when you think someone doesn’t ‘feel’ right. It’s prompted me many times to weigh a kitten every 12 hours instead of daily or to add a couple mid-week weigh ins to make sure someone doesn’t have a problem.

But to me, the weigh in can be the first indicator that something is wrong. You might not feel a 1 oz drop in weight in a 18 oz kitten, but the scale does. And the kitten may still be active, eating, and seemingly fine. But that 1 oz drop means I’ll weigh again tomorrow to make sure 1 oz hasn’t become 2 or 3, signalling a real problem. Kitten too cold, getting an infection, something?

It’s also about trends. If you weigh your kittens regularly, you know that a 3 oz per week gain is about average (depending on  your lines, of course!) If someone has a week or two of 1 or 1.5 oz gains when everyone else is gaining 3-4 oz a week, again, there might be a problem worth investigating. It could be something as simple as the slow poke is getting pushed away from the nipple by the others — or the nipple he wants to use is blocked by fur. He might need a little kick start in the form of supplementation with a bottle, syringe, or tube. In the wild, this slow gainer might not make it, simply because he doesn’t get enough nutrition, but breeders are all about making sure everyone gets as good a chance at a long healthy life as we can give them. On the sadder, hard side of this is that some kittens really do have a problem that cannot be solved. If you are paying attention and follow up, you may save this little one from days of suffering before he finally crosses the Bridge. No matter what the result of your careful monitoring, I think the few minutes spent weighing your kittens is worth it.

Okay off my soapbox and off to lunch. Have a great weekend everyone!

At our house, we call the laser pointer the “Little Red Fairy”. Our old one’s batteries have been dead for some time, so the younger cats in the house have never seen the Little Red Fairy. That was remedied yesterday when I bought a new one. Let the fun begin!

As expected, Taiba, Polgara, and Basia were wildly enthusiastic about chasing the fairy across the floor and up the walls. (Yes, up the walls — Polgara jumped about 5 feet up the wall in pursuit last night.) At one point I made the fairy go up on our bed and Taiba followed in hot pursuit. When the fairy disappeared a little later while they were chasing it on the floor, she jumped back on the bed and search all over for it, meowing — calling for it? — the entire time. Jeremy and I had a few moments of naughtiness when we tried to get the girls to whack Shira in pursuit of the fairy. We’d get them running after it and then aim it at Shira’s side. No sale. Buzz came the closest, but even she stayed about a foot away, just waiting for the fairy to move on. No way was anyone going to whack Shira, no matter how many little red fairies were perched on her.

Avi and Rand also liked the fairy. Rand was quite willing to chase it across the floor, while Avi preferred to bat at it as it circled around her. They didn’t get that much of a chance to play, though, because every time the bigger girls realized the fairy was by the little kids they’d come charging over.

The more surprising fairy chaser was Talia. Talia is often quiet and sedate, but she, too, was running like crazy through the kitchen and dining room after the fairy. Peanut, Bug, and Spaz were also having some fun — when the terrible trio (Taiba, Polgara, & Buzz) would let them have a turn.

If you’ve never played with your cats using a laser pointer or pen, go buy one now. Okay, the next time you’re out running errands. You can find them in the pet section of stores like Walmart and Target, at pet stores like PetsMart and Petco, and a whole number of other places. They don’t have to be the ones that are marketed for pets. Just remember when you’re playing not to shine them directly in your cat’s eyes. Most cats love them and it’s great exercise for them to chase the fairy all over the room or house.