My mother’s two-year-old Siamese has been biting off his fur; first on his tail, now on his side. Of course, she took him to the vet, and they did blood and skin tests, all of which came out negative. The vet now has the cat on prednisone, saying that it might be a skin infection of some sort.
I’m surprised they didn’t try anything topical—when my cats have had skin problems, either nolvosal (a blue liquid antiseptic) or a hydrocortisone cream worked.
Now, the vet is making noises about a “pet behavioralist,” which I think is one step away from crystals and chanting! This is a perfecly happy, well-adjusted and active cat—he plays with his brother, eats, grooms, purrs, all the normal cat stuff.
This can’t be too unusual a problem—any help out there?
Maybe your mom needs a new vet, or a second opinion. I guess I’m cynical but…pet shrinks? Huh.
Is the cat a strictly indoor cat? Sounds like my late cat’s flea allergies…but I’d have to guess that’d be one of the first things the vet’d check. Like people, cats can develop allergies at any time in their lives.
Since I can’t see the cat, and I am not a vet, only a nurse, I cannot make a diagnosis, but psychogenic alopecia is common in cats. You can try a pet behavioralist. Cats can be very neurotic creatures and perhaps something is bothering it. You can use drugs too, like Buspar, Prozac and Amitriptyline, but personally, I would use drugs as a last resort. Ask for a referral to a board certified dermatologist and get a second opinion.
You know you are a vet tech when: you can eat your lunch with one hand and clean up a parvo blowout with the other.
The cat’s strictly indoors, and it couldn’t be fleas, or both cats would have it. I’m thinking some kind of allergic skin rash, though a skin test turned up nothing. Maybe just very dry, itchy skin?
Now, I have a cat who’s certifiably nuts, but Morgan (the cat in question) is a very placid, happy, active cat. His brother, my Mom and lots of toys to play with; he doesn’t seem to have any quirks or problems. I tend to think vets send 'em to the cat shrink when they don’t know what else to do (you may guess, I put “pet shrinks” somewhere on a level with phone pychics).
Eve, my cat did that once, and it did turn out to be a psychological problem, not a physical one. (However, I did not send her to a kitty shrink to figure this out.)
I had moved to Mexico and taken her with me. The move to a new place was stressful enough, but I also took in a couple of stray kittens and a stray dog (though not all at the same time) until I could find them homes. Having always been an only cat, this did not sit too well with her at all. She began biting the fur off around her tail and then on her stomach, until her stomach was completely bare down to the pink skin (and she’s a long haired cat, so you can imagine how ridiculous this looked).
Then I moved to L.A. and the vet here put her on prednisalone (sp?) (a form of prednisone). I decided I didn’t want her on it because of the side effect of causing liver damage, so I stopped giving it to her. A short while after settling in and having no other cats around, she stopped biting on herself and eventually all of her beautiful fur grew back.
I know you said your mom’s cat seems happy and well-adjusted, but could there have been some change in her environment recently that would cause her to be upset?
And don’t rule out the possibility of fleas, either. Fleas can come in your house through screens, or when a door is opened. My cat is highly allergic to fleas, and even having one on her will cause biting (though not to the degree that she had when she bit her fur off).
I do hope you figure out what’s causing it and that your mom’s kitty is better soon!
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
Thanks, Shayna—but none of those theories seem to fit in this particular case. If it were fleas, the other cat would have them, too (they sleep all curled up together). And there hasn’t been ANY kind of change or trauma that might have started this. All very odd.
The cat is on prednisone (actually, so is my Mom, though she doesn’t bite herself!). The cat’ll go back to the vet on Tuesday, and I hope they’ll at least TRY some kind of topical treatment—makes sense, for what seems to be a skin problem.
I have this mental image of kitty on a couch, with a comic-strip Freud going “Zo, you heff lonkinks for ze kitty-toyz, eh?”
That’s just the type you have to worry about. They’re just the type to go shoot up a MacDonald’s and afterwards everybody will be saying “but he was always such a quiet cat.”
Actually, a pet behavioralist is not quite the same as an animal psychologist. Most importantly, the pet behavioralist looks at both the animal and its owner.
One of the more classic cases, I think, involves a pot-bellied pig that was becoming aggressive. The solution was simple to the behaviorist (although not, obviously, to the owners): they were scratching the pig’s belly a lot. Among swine, the subordinate animal scratches the superior animal’s belly. Therefore, the pig concluded, if the owners were scratching its belly, it must be the top dog…err, pig.
I have no doubt, Eve, that any obvious error would be immediately noted and correctly by you or your mother. It might be well to get some advice about the unobvious, though.
I’m surprised also that the vet didn’t mention the use of an Elizabethan collar. It cures nothing, of course, but prevents the cat from biting off more of its fur, and perhaps doing harm to itself.
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
Thanks, Akat. The thought of a collar was brought up—but in my experience all those things do is drive the cat insane. One of my cats needed one after abdominal surgery, and she couldn’t eat (the collar pushed the dish away!), couldn’t sleep, and eventually I had to take the damn thing off.
My Mom wracked her brains for anything that could be upsetting the cat, but came up blank. We’re consulting another vet . . .
You may not need cortisone and you don’t need prednisone. If you use either, limit it to a maximum period of two weeks, and taper the cat off—don’t take him off all at once. You should talk with a homeopathic specialist to learn the surface cleansing agent or formula that may bring gentle relief and no side effects to the cat. Check food and environment for cat’s exposure to extreme irritants like chemicals, habitual meals of bad stuffs, troublesome other pets animals or offensive people, and other things you could suspend as a test. Make sure, if you don’t let the cat claw and knaw and rub at anything of yours, that you have, just for the cat, items around that the cat knows it can freely claw and knaw and rub at.
Does the cat have plenty to knaw, claw and rub at. Toys (such as balls and strings) are not enuff. Yea, forget the shrinks, but ask good (not necessarily common) questions: Is your cat free to travel about the house, or are there off-limit areas where the cat is subject to bitter scorn or pubichment. Is any unnecessary treatment of the cat allowed that the cat may consider a nuisance, while you do not. So, while you do not necessarily need a shrik for the cat, there reamin question relating to the cat’s intelligent life—and they are question from which you shouldn’t shrink.
What is the cat’s outdoor life like. Is the get getting mixed up with trouble outside. Is anyone after the cat (a dog). These test questions suggest that you experiment with the routine. If the cat is usually let out the house at a certain scheduled time according to your convenence, you may need to check whether it’s right now (as of lately) a terribly inconvenient time for the cat. If a dog has become accostomed to teasing the cat on schedule, the cat may be anxious over the routine.
Umm, I’m not prepared to clinicaly address the issue you bravely carried to the forefront. The cat, however, may be outraged at the conduct between his brother and the people involved. SHAME!!! Y’ALL GO SEE A SYKYEETRIST!!!
Oh, yea, I’m familar with many such cases. Indeed, one pig had an expression by which he called his owner just before a deadly occurance. Yah, he called his owner: Ham dinner. You remember old Ham VonSchregger, don’t you. Well, that’s what became of him!
I remember when in the second grade old mean Mr. Meaghen made me read the freegin assignment over agin twice. I was so upset I had to see a behaviorist. He made me eat sugar christals, which only made me more anxious, so then I was told to chant, so I started chanting “I hate ol’ Mean meaghan and the freegin behaviorist,” so then they put me on prozac-o-cortedni-zone, which, needless to know, put me right into another zone, so my mommy bought me a cat. When it started to eat it’s furr, his brother and my mother, well-----here we go again!!!
