Cat Musings – Caring for a Special Needs Kitty

From the first time I saw the little gray and white kitten on the sidewalk outside my front door, I felt compelled to give him a better life.

Eli crept into the living room while I tapped on my computer keyboard. He made his way stealthily to the patio doors where he knelt on all fours and peered through the glass at the birds flitting around my feeder. He turned to look at me through squinting, ever-cautious green eyes.

“Oh, my goodness, Eli,” I spoke to him quietly, my voice filled with concern. He looked terrible, even worse than usual for this point in time. Had it already been six weeks since his last allergy shot? Although he was too far away to see them clearly, I knew there were sores on his head and face where he had scratched relentlessly. The worst one just under his left eye was oozing a bit. What was he allergic to, you ask? Everything. At least that’s the way it seemed. Could be his food. Might be something in the air, like dust or dust mites. Maybe it was the other cats. Without extensive testing, there really was no way to know for sure, but with a cat, especially a semi-feral one like Eli, testing wasn’t a realistic option. And so, every six weeks or so during the winter, and every two or three months in the warm months, I would go through the harrowing experience – for both of us – of catching him to take him to the vet for a corticosteroid shot and often a broad-spectrum antibiotic too, because of the scabs and open sores that were usually present.

Of all of my cats, Eli is the most harmless, sweet-natured little beastie you will ever meet. He bit me once when he was a kitten, just after I had trapped him, because he was positively terrified, but since that time, for nearly six years now, he has never struck out with teeth or a claw. Unlike Josephine, who I believe had some limited exposure to humans, Eli was a true feral. Until I trapped him at around two months of age, he had never been touched by a human hand. As I have described him in previous posts, I believe there is a constant battle being waged inside him between his wild nature and the part of him that longs for the turmoil inside to cease and to be perfectly at ease the way his brothers and sisters are, completely domesticated. During my initial visits to the vet for allergy shots and before my veterinarian converted his patient files to electronic version, I would see the word “CAUTION” in bold capital letters at the top of Eli’s file. It didn’t take too many visits before Dr. Kelly marked through it, acknowledging that he may have been feral at one time, but he was certainly harmless. It was truly a pitiful sight to watch as he was gently scruffed and lifted from the carrier in the tightest ball he could make with his little body, his wiry little tail tucked around him like a rope, his head down and eyes wide with fear.

It is still an odyssey to catch him. Each time, he learns where not to go – like into my closet where I can easily close the door and he has no path of escape. I learned a long time ago to prepare the house for these moments. It starts with shutting the bedroom, bathroom, and closet doors, with the exception of my own closet. It has proved to be an efficient place to cloister him. Even so, I plan for the inevitable back-and-forth from one side of my bed to the other when he tries to take refuge underneath it. It sits fairly high. High enough that I can slide under it on my belly, but that has become increasingly more difficult for me as I have grown older and deal with the effects of chemotherapy on my hips and legs. I need to get a platform bed, for more reasons than simply to facilitate catching Eli. It would make it easier for me to get in and out of bed every day, but that’s another matter.

On this most recent attempt to catch him, he managed to avoid my closet, and realizing there was no access to the rooms upstairs and the previous folly of the traps in my bedroom, he decided his chances might be better downstairs. It was actually a smart strategy on his part, because at one point, after I had unfolded the sofa bed to eliminate him climbing into the sofa as a safe haven, I stood breathless in the middle of my living room, beads of sweat trickling down my face, with no idea where he had managed to steal off to.

As I passed the Harry Potter closet under the staircase, it occurred to me he might have slipped in there unseen through the cat door. I backed up and opened the door, peering in briefly, but I didn’t see him. After another trip upstairs where I again checked under the bed, in the dresser drawers, in my bathtub, and in my closet and was satisfied he wasn’t up there, I closed my bedroom door behind me and went back downstairs. Where could he be?

I retrieved my step stool and flashlight and searched the space above my kitchen cabinets where Samson likes to go sometimes. No Eli. I even looked in my lower kitchen cabinets in case he had managed to pull a door open and slip inside one. Not there either. This animal was a Houdini. Looking down at the flashlight in my hand, I decided to take a more thorough look in the only place downstairs that he might be, the Harry Potter closet.

Sure enough, there he was. He had squeezed his little body into the narrowest part where the stairs and the floor came together at a sharp angle. A small bookcase on the right and a plastic rolling cabinet sitting perpendicular to it blocked the space so that it was good only for storing the kind of things one rarely needed. I pulled the bin where I collected recyclables against the door, blocking the opening where the cats passed through to the litter box, and rolled the plastic cabinet out of the way so I could maneuver the carrier in front of Eli. Now, the only place he could go was into the opening of the carrier. It took some nudging with one of the plastic accessories from my vacuum cleaner to gently coax him to move. He was like a taxidermy display, stiff and immobile, but eventually, he realized his only choice was to resign himself to the inevitable. As he reluctantly skulked into the carrier, he must have thought, the dastardly human won again!

On the way home from the vet’s, I heard for the umpteenth time an advertisement on the radio for a supplement for dogs and cats that is touted as nothing short of miraculous in healing everything from stinky breath to scratching one’s hide hairless. You know, I thought, if there was a chance that it could help Eli, why not give it a try? So, I ordered some. It arrived last week. My initial concern was that Eli would reject his food altogether if he didn’t like the way it smelled or sensed something was off about it. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened. I’ve followed the instructions to start with just a small amount of the supplement, gradually increasing it to give his digestive system time to adjust. He’s done so well that I’m now giving him a full can of wet food in the morning as opposed to half that he would normally get, and he scarfs it down. I’m hoping that in addition to helping the skin issues, he might put on some weight as well. As John likes to say, “He needs to eat a peanut butter and jelly sammich!”

You see, I consider Eli to be a special needs kitty. While I can’t say for sure, I believe he was likely the runt of his litter; he came into the world with a disadvantage from the get-go. In addition to being scrawny, he had an umbilical hernia as a result of his umbilical cord ring not sealing properly. He isn’t any less intelligent than my other cats, but he is definitely diminutive and timid, and I think they sometimes take advantage of that nature. Not all of them, certainly, but my boldest ones do. Take Josephine, for instance. She is not even a year old yet, but she is indomitable. She likes to play, but she tends to bully Eli. She outweighs him, and she’s confident to the point of cockiness. Like the tormentor on the playground, she chases him around the furniture until he retreats upstairs or wherever she’s not. Until I started giving him the supplement, she would beeline to his food bowl in the mornings even before she finished her own, and he would compliantly back away and let her have her fill. I don’t allow her to do that anymore.

Andre is another of my cats who has no patience for Eli, who, for unfathomable reasons, adores him. The adoration is completely lost on Andre. When Eli affectionately head-bumps him, he recoils as though Eli carries some nasty contagion. If Eli plops down to curl up next to him, he gets up and moves away. As much as I love him, it’s sad to see him behave that way, but there’s not a thing I can do about it. Andre is very different in his own right. If he were a human, I would suspect he would be diagnosed as autistic because, when it comes right down to it, he treats me pretty much the same way. It’s unusual for him to seek out affection, and when he does, it’s on his terms. For example, on the rare occasion when he hops up on the recliner and curls up on the blanket next to me, I dare not pet him more than once or twice or he will promptly hop down.

One might assume that my alpha male, Samson, might harass Eli in some way, but he doesn’t. It’s another special trait of my little black panther that I admire. He is tolerant and even affectionate to Eli on occasion, never hissing at him, although he will swipe in his direction if he feels he’s trespassing on his attention time with me. He does that to all of the cats except Andre, who, for reasons I just explained, doesn’t present the opportunity.

From the first time I saw the little gray and white kitten on the sidewalk outside my front door, I felt compelled to give him a better life. I think it’s highly unlikely Eli would have survived very long as a feral in the wild. His gentle nature is so endearing; his trust when he allows me to stroke his back or scratch his head is so very satisfying. So is the hope that someday, the side of him that yearns to be domesticated will win out over the wild instinct to be afraid, and he will truly know what it’s like to be loved.