h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

NaJoPoMo 2015 Bobstafford A Message in a bottle


Cats

14.11.2015


Just had a cat raid the dinner table and make off with a chicken bone and eat about 2.5 inches of it. It is said chicken bones are dangerous to cats so posted the question on the WWW and had some advice from a vet and a diet sheet suggesting rice, dry cooked chicken and mashed pumpkin.

Surprisingly he ate it and seamed to love it, but now we have 3 days of waiting for things to pass and hope there is no stomach pain, fever or blockage.

A further joy is to keep an eye on the litter box to see if there are bits of bone in the poo. Thats a pass time to look forward to, still all part of the joy of living with cats. Lets hope it all turns out well (fingers crossed firmly) and vets on Monday just in case.

[Amy P]

Hope everything goes well.

In our house there is a small 'restaurant' on the ground floor and the one who owns it has a cat. The only thing the cat gets to eat is scraps from the kitchen, which at the moment are mostly bones from geese with some left-over meat on them. He places them in a huge (sometimes stinking) heap in the courtyard and leaves the poor cat alone with them. The cat did not die yet, but I am scared for her every time. Problem is that the restaurant guy thinks he knows everything better and everyone else is stupid. It makes no sense to talk to him.

Chicken bones can mean serious problems for dogs, but I've never known a cat to have problems with them.

Birds and rodents they catch themselves, they generally eat everything except feathers.

Once, dissecting a furball about the size of a walnut coughed up by a cat, I found nothing in it except matted mouse hair, mouse incisors and mouse molars and mouse toenails.

The cat had digested everything else without trouble.

Feral cats actively prefer birds, insects and reptiles and often utterly disdain mammalian meat, perhaps precisely on account of the hairball hazard.

The problem is not with birds as such but COOKED birds. Heating the bones changes the structure and makes them more porous. That's why cat's can catch and eat any bird they like, but you should never give them (or dogs) bones of cooked birds.