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Archive for January 31st, 2023

Diary #657

Posted in Diary, tagged , on January 31, 2023| 5 Comments »

Grace’s cat Aeryn will turn 21 in March, and though she’s not on her last legs yet, she definitely has her share of the problems of age.  She has arthritis and cataracts, doesn’t hear too well, and appears to be suffering the feline equivalent of dementia; she spends a lot of time wandering around the house yowling, and the only thing that seems to calm her is a THC concentrate Grace makes for her and puts into her food.  The only food she won’t quickly throw up is pate-style cat food, and even then we need to water it down somewhat because she hasn’t got many of her teeth left.  Of course, that doesn’t stop her from trying to eat everyone else’s food (including the dogs’ and humans’) and then, predictably, throwing up.  She also seems to have recently lost the ability to find the litterbox, which means finding turds and puddles in random places (but most often on the stair landing) has become a daily occurrence of late.  So after shampooing the rug three times in one week, I told Grace we needed to do something.  I pulled Cicero’s piglet-pen out of the garage and set it up in the living room near the heater; I put in pee-pads, a litterbox, her food & water bowls, and a pillow, and placed Aeryn inside.  We were both concerned she wouldn’t like being in a cage, even a large and comfortable one, but to our relief she seems to be quite happy with the arrangement.  Instead of spending her days wandering around the house, crying like a lost soul, she’s quietly napping on her pillow; the only time she cries is when her bowl is empty, and now that the other animals can’t get to it that only happens about once a day.  Even when Grace opened the cage door so she could come out for a while, she preferred to stay inside, and when Grace held her so I could clean the cage, she complained until we put her back.  So now I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this earlier; I guess she sees the cage not as a prison, but a safe little sanctuary from a world that has become just too big and confusing.

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