No, seriously! My wife, kids, and I woke this morning to a POOL OF BLOOD on the floor. Granted, it wasn’t a huge pool of blood, about the size of a standard playing card, maybe a tablespoon, but still, it was a POOL OF BLOOD!
So we have two cats: Olive and Pepper, two year old Maine Coon sisters who are destructive and playful. About 3-4 every morning they tear around the house attacking each other and generally destroying the house.
So about the blood; it was as I said: a small (3x5 inch) puddle of blood with another small drop about 2 feet way on our hardwood floors. As far as we could see, there was no other gore around our house. We checked the cats and can see no external wounds (though they do have long hair). The cats are acting and eating normally; no throwing up blood on our floors. The only thing we can think is they caught and ate a particularly juicy mouse. This house is old, 70 years old, and we do get mice this time of year sometimes.
Voted for a mouse. I have a new house, but when I bought it, I took half of the walls off one room and replaced them with lattice so the kitties could have outside time without actually causing havoc and chaos amounst the wildlife.
Every so often, I see blood on the floor. I just figure that a critter that needed to leave the gene pool had wandered into a room full of cats.
Something else. One of the cats may have vomited blood, for reasons other than eating glass. It would have to be a pretty big mouse to have a tablespoon of blood in it.
Like what? We have not noticed any unusual behavior from our cats, so we have not taken them to the vet. But I have had cats for going on 30 years now and I have seen nothing like this. Our cats are healthy, young, and normal (at least as far as we can tell).
Well, rats are larger than mice. Any hairball problems? Maybe one injured the other and it’s invisible underneath the hair. I’ve seen dogs and cats lick a wound until it stops bleeding. But a 3x5 pool of blood sounds like too much for a mouse.
Whoa, any chance they ate some aluminum foil? When I was a kid one of our cats started vomiting blood, and foil. He ate too much, and well, that’s all she wrote.
Outside chance, is your house built over an Indian burial ground?
Undoubtedly, Dexter set up a kill room in your house but he was in too much of a hurry to clean up properly afterwards…
… or perhaps you were sleepwalking and you paused to bleed during a nightly excursion - did you check yourself for holes??
… or we’ll soon be seeing you portrayed on a Lifetime Tragedy of the Week dramatization after you come home and find your cats playing with a disembodied hand! :eek:
Maybe a rat, but not likely a mouse. An actual pool the size of a 3x5 card? Not gonna happen. At work, we’re lucky to get a solid .3 mL out of the little buggers on a terminal bleed. I’m with elfkin477.
Look up at the ceiling. Is there blood there, dripping slowly onto the floor below from the corpsestashed in the crawlspace between floors? Or perhaps that’s what happen years ago, and that’s what your haunted house is reenacting.
I voted “something else” because a mouse wouldn’t contain that much blood. Also for years on and off I’ve had cats and old houses which = mice caught by the cats inside. I’ve never found more than a tiny tiny smear of blood, or the occasional teensy gall bladder left behind.
I can’t explain what - one of the cats vomiting seems more likely than mouse exsanguination though.
Check the cats better. It’s insanely easy for a cat to have a wound that’s completely invisible.
Case in point: I had a cat once, a short-haired yellow tabby. I took him to to vet for his yearly maintenance, and towards the end of the exam, the vet asked if I wanted his nails clipped. Sure, I said, and the vet tech took the cat in the back room where they put the hold-o-death on him in order to safely trim his nails.
They came back a minute later and got the vet.
I’m like for 5-10 minutes. Finally, the vet comes back. Seems that the cat had an abscess on his side that opened while they were holding him for the nail clipping. I guess blood burst all over the place, surprising everyone.
I had no clue; the cat hadn’t been acting weird at all. The vet had done a thorough exam on the cat, and hadn’t noticed it. And it was a short-haired cat.
So yeah, cats can have wounds that even trained professionals have trouble finding. It’s entirely possible that one of your cats got hurt during rough play and bled a bit.
(Kitty was fine after that - vet cleaned it up, put him on antibiotics, and he recovered fully)
Hmm. I voted “mouse”, but after reading the replies, I agree; that’s a lot of blood for one mouse. Could be a rat, I guess. Or could be an injury on one of the kitties. On people, some areas like the face, scalp, and ears can bleed a surprising amount from a small wound, but these wounds also tend to stop bleeding pretty quickly. I believe the same is true for cats. Also, if they’re not declawed, it’s possible one of them tore out or damaged a claw - that’ll bleed like a mother, but then stop after a few minutes, and aside from the initial pain, cats often don’t seem to notice.
Vomiting seems less likely to me if it looked like it was pure blood, rather than blood mixed with saliva and/or bile.
In any case, I think this should totally go in the BOO! forum.
This reminds me that a completely similar thing happened to one of the outdoor cats (not technically one of “my” cats but one of several strays I was caring for) that I had neutered a few years ago. Took him in to the vet early morning, they called in the afternoon to tell me everything went fine and I could pick him up first thing in the morning.
An hour after that, they called back - nope, not all fine. While working on the south end of the cat, they didn’t notice an abcess on the north end, on the back of his neck. It was covered with fur and matted over. However, when he came to in the cage someone noticed some oozing on his neck - when they checked him out it was a big nasty abcess. They had to sedate him again to shave and drain it.
Cats are extremely skilled at not letting on that they hurt; I certainly hadn’t had a clue this one had a big infected wound on his neck. He ate and acted completely normally even though that had to have hurt like hell for some time.
So “cats acting normally” doesn’t mean “nothing wrong with the cat.”
that’s a lot of blood. i suspect somebody’s hurt and just not giving it up. cats are pastmasters at hiding injury.
check both cats very carefully asap. if necessary, enlist helpers to hold the ladies steady so you can do a thorough, hands-on, body inspection. i don’t know that i wouldn’t also haul their fuzzy butts to the vet, too.
I don’t know, but I had the same mystery. Suddenly, there are about two or three tablespoons of blood spilt in a corner of my bedroom. With force; the splatters are up to a foot on the wall. I didn’t know what it was either, but one night ago the cats had a very brief fight near that wall. You know, from silence to fur flinging hisses and to silence again in under three seconds.
for 5-10 minutes. Finally, the vet comes back. Seems that the cat had an abscess on his side that opened while they were holding him for the nail clipping. I guess blood burst all over the place, surprising everyone.