Our cat absolutely hates the carrier, so we don’t use it. I picked up a harness and leash and he’s taken to it very well. You might give that a try.
Get one of these things, a soft carrier that zips along the top. Well worth the extra ten or twenty bucks.
Leave it on the floor with the top open, and scoop up kitty so that s/he’s laying on her side, with her legs against your chest, your hand on her rump, and her chin resting in the crook of your arm. Think this position.
Drop her in the carrier, slightly rump-first, and quickly close the flap with your free hand. If she tries to get her poke her head out while you’re zipping it, hold it down gently.
Putting her it butt-first on her side prevents her from getting any leverage with her legs, and you’re less likely to hurt her if she wriggles around. She’ll still scream to hell and back, but there’s much less trauma in the whole operation.
My advice is before you start, close all doors leading to bedrooms or rooms with places cats can hide. Once my cats know what is going down, all four make a beeline to the bedrooms and are under the beds where I can’t get them. i’ve had to cancel appointments when I couldn’t catch the cat who was supposed to go.
We had this problem not more than a month ago and the cat just wouldn’t go into the frontloaded carrier. We looked around for some pet store solutions and we bought a carrier that let’s you load the cat in from the top. This was a dream solution and worked absolutely prrrfectly since he loves being picked up and having one person ready to shut the top as soon he went in meant no struggles and no pain for anyone.
This method assumes you can pick up your cat though. We also found that ALOT of people at the vet asked where we got the carrier because it looked much easier to use.
Screw the carrier. Dump the cat in a pillowcase.
Seriously. My vet told me to do this. My cat loved it!
Not so much to get the cat in, but once I get it in I throw a t-shirt or something I’ve worn recently that smells like me in the carrier to calm the cat down. Works to varying degrees, except with the calico, who apparently thinks she’s on the way to the slaughterhouse every time she gets put in the thing.
Our Russian Blue girl, Meep (RIP), hated her carrier with a passion. Unfortunately she had to go for chemo treatments every week for several months, so indulging her wasn’t an option. We got pretty good at it eventually–the trick is to put the carrier in a small room (we used either a bathroom or a small laundry room). If you can get the cat into the small room and close the door before she realizes that there’s a carrier in there, the rest is relatively easy. It might take a few attempts, but she’s not going anywhere so you can afford to wait.
Needless to say, don’t start this process five minutes before you have to leave for the vet’s office. 
As a custodian of two feline overlords, I hereby reject your reality and subsitute my own:
- threaten cat1 at gunpoint (anything above a .45 will do) and demand she get in the box.
- She will promptly refuse. Explain to cat1 that since you will not go willingly in the box, you will have to shoot cat2.
- Cat1 will still ignore you and perhaps lick herself in inappropriate places “just to spite you”. At this point, shoot cat2.
- Cat1 will look up from her licking to see where the big noise came from. This presents a steady target. Take the opportunity.
- Place both cats in the carrier.
Task completed.
And as a bonus, there will be no more 3:30am wake-up calls.
As an alternative to step #5 above, this may be substituted:
5. Visit this site –well-behaved cats found here– .
Task completed.
To what? Everything I own has fur on it- usually genuine Luna-fur.
The Neville kitties are pretty good about going into their carriers. One thing we do to make it easier is that we leave the carriers out all the time in the living room. They go into the carriers on their own sometimes, and I think the fact that they go into the carriers when they’re not going to the vet makes them less scared of the carriers.
Yeahbut: I swear my cat goes into the fifth dimension. That’s where all kitties go to plan their take-over of the earth. BE AFRAID! :eek:
I used to just pick up the cat, walk to the carrier, open door and before you know it, they’re in! I found getting the carrier first set off the alarms. Wrapping in a towel sometimes worked too.
Reminds me when I took my larger cat, Brandy (rest in peace, my friend), to the vet - not my regular vet but one which was on call. I used to carry him because he got so scared once we went out the front door, he would just huddle in my arms. To give you some idea of size, he was part Burmese and very muscular…so picture a very muscular, solid Burmese only much louder!
So, after appointment was done ( I held him the whole time mainly because it was too painful to pick out his claws )…this vet (whom I must say was a little cocky and sort of arrogant) says "I have this guaranteed method of getting him into a carrier (basically, their closeable box). So he grabs the cat pretty much before I could say that’s probably not a good idea because he does like strangers, tries to get all four paws together at the same time and shove him in the box…the yowls were absolutely the loudest and the vet is bleeding from several different scratches and the cat has got all four feet pushing against the vet’s chest trying to get away. All this happens in about four seconds before I manage to make the vet let go and Brandy to latch on to me, hissing and yowling at the vet. Had I known he was going to try that, I would have told him the last time Brandy was in one of those cardboard boxes, he took the corner out of it with his claws.
Interestingly enough, that was the last time that particular vet ever came near him without me holding on to him.
This works best if you ambush a sleeping cat, and complete the maneuver before the cat knows what is happening to it.
I play mean. I leave a paper grocery bag open on the floor, lying down. No cat in history has ever resisted the lure of the open paper bag. Within moments, the victim is headfirst in the bag, waggling ass in delight.
Which is when I scoop the bag up and plop it into the carrier. If the cat has been very, very sweet lately, I sometimes remove the bag before closing the door.
Here’s what I learned in my years of working “in the back” at a vet clinic.
- open carrier and place on end (with open door up)
- scruff cat in weak hand
- hold both rear legs in strong hand (at this point the cat should be fairly immobile)
- carry cat by scruff and hind legs to carrier
- insert cat’s rear end into carrier
- smash rest of cat into carrier
- release hind legs and remove strong hand from carrier
- use free hand to close carrier door on your other wrist
- release scruff of neck, remove weak hand and press door closed with strong hand
10)latch door and place carrier in correct orientation gently to allow cat to adjust to changing direction of down
But my cat doesn’t mind her carrier and will go in when I tell her to “get in your cage”
Bolding mine. I think I got a dud. My brother’s beastie doesn’t go limp when I scruff her. My cat does and I support her hind with my other hand, holding her close to my body. But his cat gets the claws out.
She is also very difficult to give medicine to; I towel her and give her the applicable medicines (she got hit by a car last year and miraculously survived and recovered to full health - though a little loopy), which is an interesting adventure.
[ul]
[li]Fetch towel[/li][li]Locate cat[/li][li]Cover cat with towel and wrap around sharp ends[/li][li]Cradle growling cat[/li][li]Administer medicines[/li][li]Bend down to the floor and open the towel [/li][li]RUN. I cannot stress how important this step was because she’d turn around and smack me in the face. I learnt the drop, rise and run manouvre pretty quickly. [/li][/ul]
I still don’t know why I had to do the medicines - my brother was more than capable of doing it himself! She wouldn’t smack him either!
Recommended to me - and it worked with my cat who doesn’t go limp when you scruff her, and is the only cat in the 'verse who can resist the lure of cardboard boxes, paper bags, or tuna fish…
Get a cat carrier that opens at the “front” (as opposed to the top), pick the cat up so that it’s laying on your forearm, head towards your elbow, with your hand under it’s buh-tocks, insert cat into carrier ar$e first, using your free hand to secure the door of the carrier. Cat can’t see where it’s going and has no clue until it’s too late… and this cat (Judy) is the sort who will use your eyeballs as a springboard to get away from you
Oh and it’s an idea to put something (blanket or whatever) that the cat is familiar with in the carrier
From an old math joke:
The method of inverse geometry: We place a spherical carrier in the room and enter it. We then perform an inverse operation with respect to the carrier. The cat is then inside the carrier and we are outside.
Another method is to put the carrier next to the cat and wait for the cat to quantum tunnel itself into the carrier.
You didn’t get a dud, you got a dog. See, a dog will let you train it to bend to your will, a cat will bend your will to conform to its desired behaviors.
I always schedule vet appointments for all three of my OUTDOOR country cats at the same time, same day because I don’t have the energy or the time to go looking for them three separate times a year. I don’t even make the appointment until I know I have them all secured in the garage, which can take a week to accomplish. I have one of those carriers that’s big enough for a great dane. It’s huge. We lure Boo, Apollo, and Penn into the garage with the nightly feeding and close the door to the outside.
The next morning, I go out there, secure the carrier on its back side with the front side facing the ceiling, and locate one at a time. Two of my cats are pretty docile–Apollo and Penn. They’ll let you do pretty much anything you want with them. Good cats to have around kids. Boo, on the other hand, is as close to feral as a cat can be and still crave human attention. He’s all muscle and hunter. Sometimes we don’t see him for weeks. Then when he finally decides to come around again, he gifts us with a bouquet of “trophies” at our door. But I digress.
The two cats who are calm and malleable are easy to get into the carrier backfeet-first. The trick is to keep each of them from leaping out when I open the door to introduce the others. I can get one cat in fairly easily and slam the door shut, but when I go to put another one in, the first one tries to escape. When it’s Boo’s turn to go into the carrier, fuhgeddaboutit. It’s like juggling two bowling balls and a giant, angry scorpion. I’ve learned to handle Boo with care and caution. I bear the scars of a bygone battle with that beast when he sank a few claws up to the hilt into the tender skin of the underside of my forearm when he decided, without warning, that he’d had just about enough of me tickling him, thankyouverymuch.
Once in a while, one cat tries to escape, but I’ve got Jedi reflexes when it comes to nabbing a cat. It used to take me about 20 minutes to get them all stuffed into the carrier, but now I have it down to about 5 minutes. Struggling to keep one in the carrier while putting another in and keeping two from escaping while I put the third one in the carrier leaves me gasping for breath and all cat-hairy. But it’s the look of shock on each of their faces when they realize that they have lost and I have won that makes it all worthwhile.
Once, I had to take only one cat to the vet for a neutering appointment. I felt like a slacker only wrestling one kitty into a carrier.
I must have been owned by the world’s weirdest cat; all I had to do was put the carrier down and open it. He would invariably go in to check it out. I’d shut the door. After a few seconds of silence, he’d realize what he’d done and started making a fuss.
Stupid cat!
Now, giving him pills was a whole other world of hurt.
I miss him.