I’m not sure whether to put this in GQ, but it’s pretty M and P in many ways, so I’ll bung it here in the interim.
Long story short, I’ve got a moggie who is generally a very low maintenence cat. She eats, she miaows occasionally, she gets a cuddle when she is so inclined (mostly when I am sitting here at the computer for some reason!) and toilets herself outside in the garden via a permanently open window in the kitchen. She also loves being in the garden, either sunning herself on the concrete path or lounging behind the palms near the fence. when she’s not sprawled out next on the desk next to me!
Last night as I walked into the laundry, she was having a piss in the sink (right over the plug hole, thankfully). Very strange. Her pupils were as wide as saucers, and then she started scooting around the house looking for a place to poop as well.
After much ado (and growling and hissing, her not me) I caught her and bunged her outside. I stayed outside with her to make her calm and to make sure she took a shit in the appropriate place…but she layed flat on the concrete path scowling and carrying on as if she’d seen a ghost. There was NO WAY she wanted to be out there, and NO WAY she would stay, and FUCK ME if I got in her way to get back inside…where she promptly took a huge crap on the kitchen floor. :eek:
If she had been a human, I would swear she’d had a psychotic breakdown and had been hearing voices or seeing things that prompted her fear and loathing of doing what she has done for all her life. I just don’t know what ‘came over’ her last night, but it was dead-set weird.
I think my cats can see the land wights in my backyard, but the most likely explanation for that kind of behavior is a kidney infection or tummy illness of some kind. Take her to a vet, and if the vet rules out illness, see if you can book her a guest shot on Montel alongside Sylvia Browne.
I don’t know if this counts as psychotic episodes, but some Cavalier King Charles Spaniels have “fly-catcher syndrome”, where they’ll on occasion snap at imaginary insects. I had a Cav who’d do this once in a while but was otherwise normal.
Any kind of behavior change, especially in elimination patterns, is often a sign of a health issue. The behavior you described could easily be: “something really hurts and I don’t know where the hurt is coming from.” Keep an eye on her, and definitely get her to a vet if you see the odd behavior again.
My guess is she either ate or fought with something funny, or a bobcat moved in nearby and she smelled his scat and decided to cede her toilet turf to him.
There’s a slightly more ominous possibility, of course, and that’s rabies. Animals with rabies can seem very normal until the end stages of their disease. Is there rabies in your area? Has she been avoiding the water dish?
I have a cat which used to have what I described as psychotic episodes. At the time, we had two cats, both of whom were supposed to be indoors, but the male cat would occasionally get out. He was never out for long – 20 minutes max, if it took us a long time to catch him.
Regardless of how short a time he may have been out, when he was returned to the house my other cat always flipped out and behaved as though he were a complete stranger – hissing, growling, tail-fluffing, the whole 9 yards. Perhaps 5 minutes under the yew bush made him smell completely different to her.
Those have since been determined to be epileptic in nature.
A lot of seizure activity in animals may appear to be psychotic. Heck, complex partial seizures in human appear pretty deranged, if you ask me (and I have temporal lobe epilepsy ) Not all epileptiform activity is “drop-and-flop”, if you will.
In canines, rage syndrome is a form of psychotic behavior. It appears in certain breeds more than others. There is also a form of dementia that is more common in dobermans as they get older that presents some psychotic, dangerous features.
We have one cat, Clover, who occasionally looks at his own tail while it twitches, as if he can’t guess what his tail is going to do next. Then he often suddenly dashes into another room, as if trying to get away from it. It does no good, of course, because when he gets to the other room he finds his tail is still attached behind him, where it belongs.
He used to do this a lot and then pretty much stopped. Then the other day he just started up again. I think it’s because my stepdaughter came home for a visit and we had to move all the cats’ things out of her room.
And, to offer a sort of counter-diagnosis, there’s a condition called FRAP that often afflicts dogs where they run around like insane furry tornados for a few minutes.
Fortunately, it’s not harmful, and is probably normal. It’s just, well, inappropriate for a bout of Frenetic Random Acts of Play when the humans are going to bed.
) Not all epileptiform activity is “drop-and-flop”, if you will.