Last week I fed Toby as normal, but she was still hungry. So I gave her more food until her belly bulged. Dumb move. The next morning at 6:30 I was awoken by a big, wet splat. She had vomited on the toilet seat cover, down the front, and all over the bathroom floor. She vomited that night’s meal as well and became very weak and wobbly in her back end.

She had this same problem a few months ago. She became incredibly weak and was drinking enormous amounts of water and urinating frequently. She fasted for several days, and I waited until she was feeling better before taking her to a veterinarian. I mostly wanted to get a potassium supplement.

I hate going to the vet, as do my cats. Most veterinarians have the same philosophy and methodology as physicians, which is to give lip service to diet and treat symptoms without finding the underlying cause of illness. They want to take charge with therapies and pharmaceuticals, and for some reason they think that cats are better off with dried kibble made of grains, waste product meat, additives and preservatives than than actual MEAT. Come again?

So when I took Toby and I also took Tibbs, because Tibbs hasn’t been grooming herself well and I suspect problems with her teeth. She doesn’t like chewing her meat and insists on a slurry.

Toby is a very cranky girl. Always has been. The vet techs took her “into the back” to draw blood. Isn’t it funny how they never want to do that in your presence? I heard Toby screaming and walked into the back to give her a recognizable voice and smell. Toby was slightly dehydrated and her veins were difficult to tap. The tech was inserting, wiggling, pulling out the needle and Toby was just miserable. They had to flip her over and try a vein on another leg. They finally got their blood and Toby’s blood glucose shot up (as evidenced on the blood test).

This is one reason why I don’t like taking sick animals to the vet. What sick animals need most is warmth and sleep. They don’t need three people holding them down by force and repeatedly shoving needles in their body.

The blood work came back:

RBC: 10.32 M/µL (normal range 5 – 10)
BUN: 83 mg/dL (normal range 16- 36) too high
CREA: 2.0 mg/dL (normal range .8 – 2.4) so this value is good
K (potassium): 3.3 mmol/L (normal range 3.5 – 5.8) got a supplement for this

Naturally the vet wanted to hospitalize Toby and put her on an IV solution to hydrate her. The last two cats I hospitalized ended up being put to sleep in short order. So no, Toby’s not staying. I compromised by allowing them to inject some fluid under her skin. Again, they took her into the back room.

I went back when I heard Toby screaming again to find three people holding her down trying to get a needle in her. They told the vet the needle kept popping out. Kept popping out? How many times had they stuck her? “This can’t be good for her immune system,” I said. They gave up on the hydration. That’s it. We’re finished here.

The doctor wanted to sell me a reduced-protein food for kidney damage control on the idea that it’s protein that damages the kidneys. I’m reading conflicting information on the net saying that reduced protein diets don’t seem to make a difference in BUN and creatinine levels and that phosphorus is the more likely culprit.

I was informed that if Toby didn’t improve in a week that I would have to bring her back and she would be hospitalized. Suppose Toby doesn’t improve because she’s simply dying. Do we submit her to invasive procedures in a foreign environment and herculean efforts to try to save her life? Or do we just let her die at home or spend as much time at home as possible and then put her to sleep when the pain becomes uncomfortable. Why are we so afraid of death? I mean, this girl is 16-1/2 years old. She’s something like in her late 70s in humans terms.

I don’t want her to die, but I certainly don’t want her spending her last days in a cage surrounded by strange people and smells. That’s what happened to Tiny, and it was awful.

I mentioned this situation to a woman whose research and efforts reversed her child’s autism via homeopathy. She recommended I try homeopathy. I took Toby to the homeopath yesterday, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I encountered.

The new vet walked in looking like a diminutive Jed Clampett with a pot belly smelling faintly of bad breath and, wait, was that alcohol? I explained the situation and he came back with a needle of “remedy.” I asked what it was and he said, “It’s for detoxification.” I replied, “Okay, so how does it work?” “It detoxifies,” he replied. “Do you know what detoxification is?” I tried getting across to him that I was interested in how it worked physiologically, and he said, “If you’re scared of it, we won’t use it,” and walked out the room. “Wait!” I cried.

This guy had no idea what I was after. All he could tell me was that nobody knows how homeopathy works and this substance helped the body detoxify. He threatened several times to leave the room. I finally let him give it to her. In went the needle, squeeze, a little protest by Toby, and it was all over.

He assured me that he has reversed many cases of renal failure, and he’s had his patients go back to their original vet to have lab work redone to find the values have normalized. He gave me a liquid and some capsules to give to Toby twice a day.

I asked him if he had done dental work on cats, and he was confident he could take care of Tibbs’s teeth for a much lower cost than other vets. But after I got that whiff of what I thought was alcohol, I got the feeling I shouldn’t trust him to put my beautiful Tibbs under.

I’ve had these moments of intuition, which I’ve largely ignored. The last time was when I took some shoes to a cobbler to get fixed. I went back the next week to pick up the shoes and drop off a couple coats for new zippers only to find he had lost my shoes. I went behind his counter and found them. My intuition said, “Don’t leave your coats here,” but I ignored it.

Two weeks later he said the coats had not been brought back from the business that did work for him. I went to that business, and they didn’t have the coats. I went back to the cobbler and found my coats hanging in the back of the room. He wanted $30 for replacing two zipper pulls. I only had $20, which he took. I visited the other cobbler who put on the zipper pulls, and they said they could sew in an entirely new zipper for $22. I had been had. I vowed then to begin listening to my intuition.

Even though it may be cheaper with this vet and easier than finding another vet with a better price, Tibbs is too precious to take the chance. So I’m following my intuition this time for sure. Here’s the estimate for dental work from the vet:

Dental cleaning – Level 3: $210
VetTest Profile PAP: $59
Miscellaneous Prescription Product $30 to 45
ECG Diagnostic: $49
Local Anesthetic Block: $32
Dental Xray over 5 films: $94
Clndamycin Inj 150 mg/ml: $26
Oral Surgery: $120 to 240

Total: $620 to $755

Do you suppose they clean the teeth and then extract them?

There’s another veterinary service in town that specializes in dentistry and they offer free consultation. I’m going to take her there and see what they recommend and charge. But this needs to happen soon, because bad teeth poison the whole body.

For years I donated a monthly amount to help protect North American wolves, which have been threatened with extinction. I’ve answered every call to contact my government to ask them to protect the wolves.

Everytime I think we’ve succeeded in protecting them, my government finds an opportunity to kill them. Now, according to Defenders of Wildlife, the government will be issuing up to 70,000 permits at $11.75 each to reduce the wolf populations in Idaho and Montana to 300 to 450 wolves from a population of about 1,300. That’s 70 permits per wolf. Huh?

These wolves were eliminated in the 1920, and we had to import some from Canada to reestablish populations in Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho.

What’s really sickening is that in 2008 there were only 52 Mexican wolves in Mexico and Arizona. FIFTY-TWO!!!

Please say NO to delisting the gray wolf and help Defenders of Wildlife help them. This animal is a vital part of the ecosystem.

I’ve been feeding my cats ground, raw meat and bones since 1992, and I recently decided to switch them over to whole prey to improve their teeth. Over the years they have enjoyed occasional whole chicken necks, but I didn’t really have a reliable, affordable supply for whole prey. I do now.

Tonight I cut up my first whole rabbit (I’ll spare you the pictures, unless you want to see them). I cut one up a few nights ago, but that one was already skinned. Tonight’s rabbit was complete.

My supplier raises rabbits in a humane environment where they can run around, and she buys others from local farmers, mostly from the Amish. The rabbits are euthanized with CO2 gas and then bagged and frozen.

The first thing I did was use a cleaver to take off a foot, which I gave to Pinegar. He gleefully ran into the living room with it, throwing it up in the air repeatedly and catching it again. He was acting just like a cat. I love to see it.

I had to cut off the fur, because I realized it would get everywhere and make a mess. I threw out the intestines and stomach and dismantled the rest with knife and cleaver, making sure everybody got a good piece with meat on it.

My 15-year-old cat Lyla has completely taken to the whole prey concept, happily crunching bones and eating organs. And I’m so happy about it, because her teeth need cleaning desperately, which was the main reason I switched to whole prey.

Lyla and Pinegar eating an Oregon rabbit Boy brought home

Tibbs, my 16-year-old, has been slow to come around. She’s never cared for bones, and not once has she eaten a chicken neck, but this morning she ate some whole baby rabbits, and she did a good job tonight on the piece of rabbit I gave her, leaving only a hard section of bone behind.

TipToe ate her share and then threw it up on my desk, right on the place where I had just moved my beading books for fear she might throw up on them. Sure enough.

The cats ate the whole rabbit, including the head. Pinegar is still growling over his rabbit’s foot, and his brother Arthur is in the kitchen entertaining himself with an ear. In the freezer I have pieces of turkey, chicken and duck along with organ meat: chicken gizzards, hearts and liver.

For those of you who find this whole idea distasteful because bunnies must die, where do you think canned and bagged pet food comes from? From the left over pieces of the factory-farmed livestock you eat (who lived a wretched life), from roadkill, from euthanized pets, from anywhere cheap meat is found with no regard to how it’s raised.

My cats are getting the best nutrition possible under the circumstances from animals humanely raised and slaughtered. I don’t like cutting up rabbits. But I like having healthy cats. I don’t like eating factory-farmed meat, so I sure don’t want my cats eating it.

If you’d like to improve your pets’ nutrition, think about feeding them whole prey. It’s more work and it can be messy, but you’ll improve your pets’ health considerably. Look for videos on YouTube of animals eating raw meat and bones. Next best thing is ground, raw meat and bones, which is much cleaner and easier.

If you live on the east coast, you can get food from Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow. They have several distributors on the east coast. If you live on the west coast, you can get rabbits from Wholefoods4pets. When I was in Oregon I got raw food from a healthy pet store. Search the Internet.

Oh, an added bonus of feeding your pets raw meat is little or no odor from feces. When we first moved into this apartment and my cats were on canned food, the stench was unbelievable. Now I never know when they’ve defecated. Healthy teeth, clean, shiny, sweet smelling coat, and few or no vet appointments. You will, however, have a very energetic animal.

Visit:
Raw Meaty Bones
United States Raw Meaty Bones Support Group
Raw Learning
Raw Fed Cats

Two hours later, Pinegar is still playing with this foot. This is the most exercise he’s gotten this year! He’s on the futon with me now tossing it up in the air, plopping against me, having an absolute blast!

Want to give your pet a real treat? Order some dehydrated rabbit feet, ears or how about some dehydrated ground goat?

It makes me so frustrated when people force-feed their sick dogs and cats on the mistaken–and deadly–notion that the animal needs energy! There’s no better way to increase the likelihood of your pet dying than to force it to eat food it can’t digest.

Animals are more instinctual than humans and have not been brainwashed into a certain mode of action. Animals who become ill or injured stop eating, find a warm spot, and rest until recovery. If humans were smart, they’d take note and follow their example.

A lot of energy is used up in the digestion and assimilation of food. This energy is better spent in elimination of toxins and repair of tissues. Fasting does not mean starving. The body contains all the nutrient reserves needed for the body, and using nutrient from the body’s stores is far more efficient than digesting it. The energy saved from digestion is then diverted to healing.

To stop the food intake takes a heavy load off the internal economy. The work of digesting and assimilating food and of discarding the waste and refuse portions all ceases. The heart and lungs have less work to perform. The liver and kidneys are given a rest. In fact, the whole physiology is given a rest. The energy usually employed in digesting and assimilating food is now used for eliminating or neutralizing the toxic matter that is forcing the reaction… Food that is eaten in acute disease does not nourish anyway. The more the patient eats, the worse he becomes so that the danger lies really on the other side. –Herbert Shelton, Human Life Its Philosophy and Laws

The body has only so much energy with which to repair itself. If this energy is diverted to eliminating food forced on the animal, attempting to excrete drugs, nervous exhaustion from trips to the vet, inability to sleep due to nausea and constant handling by humans hoping to “show their love,” then you will wear your animal out.

Leave it be! It’s so much smarter than you are.

It is of no advantage to urge food upon the stomach when there is no digestive power to work it up. There is never any danger of starvation so long as there are reserved forces sufficient to hold the citadel of life and start anew its main-springs.

For when sustenance becomes a prime necessity, the digestive apparatus will be clothed with power enough to work up some raw material, and a call made for it proportioned to the ability to use it. And if there is not power within the domain of life to save the organism, it must perish. –Jennings, Tree of Life

My cats fast when ill and I leave them alone. The only thing I make sure they have is water and a warm place to sleep. It’s scary as hell not doing anything, because every vet will want to “do something,” and if your animal dies you will be blamed for not taking it to the vet for treatment. But if the animal dies under the vet’s ministrations, the disease will be blamed. How very convenient.

Here are my cats who fasted and recovered without food or drugs.

Tip Toe: Has fasted three times, 7 days each preceded by vomiting. Took her to the vet. Normal bloodwork. Vet wanted to treat with antibiotics. I declined. She’s 15 years old and still with me.

Toby (pictured above): Bloody diarrhea for three days, fasted 8 days, followed by bloody nose, sneezing and coughing. Normal bloodwork. Vet wanted to treat with antibiotics. I declined. She’s 15-1/2 years old now.

Lyla: Upper respiratory and eye infections. Fasted 8 days. I don’t even take them to the vet anymore. She’s 15 years old.

Tibbs: Upper respiratory and eye infections. Fasted 3 or 4 days. I’ve learned by now to just leave them alone. If they’re going to survive, they need all the energy they can muster. She’s 15-1/2 years old.

Under ordinary circumstances, the generalized food reserves of man and animal are capable of sustaining functional and structural integrity for a considerable time without more food being consumed. Under the most favorable circumstances of quiet, rest and mental poise, these reserves are capable of holding out much longer… These reserves are stored up for just such uses and there are times and conditions when they must be used. Indeed there are conditions of “disease” in which it is impossible to make use of food from any other source–conditions in which the body is unable to take the raw materials and make use of them. –Herbert Shelton, The Science and Fine Art of Fasting

Additional reading:
Feeding My Cats Whole Raw Rabbit, Chicken, Duck and Turkey
Cats Get Sick after Cross Country Road Trip
I Think I Poisoned My Cat

Dr. John Tilden, in his book Toxemia Explained: The True Interpretation of the Cause of Disease (read the book here), states that disease is caused by toxemia plus enervation. He writes:

DEFINITION of Toxemia and crises of Toxemia:—In the process of tissue building—metabolism—there is cell building—anabolism—and cell destruction—catabolism. The broken down tissue is toxic and in health—when nerve energy is normal—it is eliminated from the blood as fast as evolved. When nerve energy is dissipated from any cause—physical or mental excitement or bad habits—the body becomes enervated, when enervated, elimination is checked, causing a retention of toxin in the blood or Toxemia. This accumulation of toxin when once established will continue until nerve energy is restored by removing the causes. So-called disease is nature’s effort at eliminating the
toxin from the blood. All so-called diseases are crises of Toxemia.

Lyla sick for 8 days

This has never been more evident than in my cats following our road trip from Oregon to Pennsylvania. A few weeks after arriving my cats began getting eye infections. One or both eyes would swell and begin excreting pus.

I even got sick myself. A couple weeks after arrival I woke up completely weak with an incapacitating headache. I drank some water and threw it up. I couldn’t keep anything down. The next day I was fine but a week later I spent the night sneezing with runny nose and eyes and felt tired most of the day.

Lyla became very sick. She stopped eating and would spend all day sleeping in a warm location in the bathroom. She became slightly dehydrated, lost weight, was weak and a tad wobbly on her feet. This went on for eight days. She continued to drink water from the faucet (not the best source but she gets whatever she wants at this point). On some days she showed an interest in food but ate no more than half a teaspoon on the days she did eat.

Two years ago her brother George had the same symptoms after we moved into my new house. Upper respiratory infection, they call it. The current “wisdom” is that it’s caused by viruses or bacteria. That means we must have driven through a patch of kitty germs on the freeway that took three weeks to infect the cats! Or maybe these pernicious germs were lounging about the house just waiting for cats to pounce on. Or maybe a cloud of them wafted through the window! (See Germs: A Natural Hygiene Perspective) I took George to the vet for hydration therapy and antibiotics. He died and my heart was broken. What would have happened had I left him alone, had I trusted his body’s own immune system?

Two of my cats have fasted for over a week (Toby once and TipToe twice) and I left them alone. They recovered. When animals are sick, they fast. I have learned to trust nature and the innate wisdom of the body. Digestion takes a lot of energy, energy that is needed in healing the body and fighting infection. The body can live on its own reserves during this time.

The cross country trip was so stressful to the cats causing a lowering of nerve energy, which caused a buildup of toxins in their systems that had reached a critical point and had to be removed. Another physiological insult the cats received was when I switched them from raw to canned food in preparation for the trip. They had been eating it for two months.

I was really worried about Lyla. I knew that her body had only such much energy to carry her through this crisis. But I also knew that her body had instituted this crisis to reduce the toxins that had accumulated in her body. I kept trying to get her to eat because I was so worried. Then I thought, “What am I doing?! I know better than this. She’ll eat when she’s able.” Fasting, sleep and warmth is what Lyla needed. So I quit trying to get her to eat and made sure she had all the water she needed.

If I had taken Lyla to the veterinarians, they would have introduced antibiotics into her system. These would have killed off the bacteria and would have loaded her system with a toxic drug and dead bacteria that would need to be excreted. (Every creature contains bacteria, good and bad. We have all evolved together. And when you kill them all at once, that’s a big load of toxins to dump on the organs of elimination.) The vet would also have forced hydration on her. Then her body would have to deal with the introduction of water that she could not and would not take in herself. When I drank water my body couldn’t use it threw it up. How does a cat easily remove water that’s been injected under the skin? Add to that the stressful trip to the vet, the handling, the meddling, and you have a thoroughly enervated cat. A young cat might easily survive such handling, but a 15-year-old might not.

Tibbs is the last to get sick

No, Lyla stays home and recovers on her own, and recover she did. Around the eighth day she came out of the bathroom during feeding time wanting food. She ate small quantities for a few days, so I fed her four times a day. Now she’s at twice a day.

TipToe hasn’t been eating much for several days, but this morning she ate quite a bit. Now Tibbs is flushing her toxins. Her eyes are runny and she’s eating little.

All the other eye infections have cleared on their own. No drugs. No vets. Just nature at her best.

A masterful packing job

Continued from Part I.

Tom and Mike needed to fit ten cat carriers, a litter box, three boxes of litter, four cases of canned cat food, two suitcases, one valise, two pillows, a bathrobe, two bags, two boxes, a gun case, a few odds and ends and three people in an SUV. They did it somehow.

I left my beautiful home for good and led the way in my Mazda Speed 6 to WalMart to get some disposable paper bowls to feed the cats. Then we went to the credit union where I parked my car and handed the keys to an employee, telling her I could no longer make payments. Then I climbed into the SUV and off to Pennsylvania we went.

Goodbye Veneta home

The first rule was “No one opens a door unless all cat are enclosed in their carriers.” We started letting cats out within hours and they found their way to our laps. Toby (first cat, black cat) was her typical charming self, hissing, chuffing, lashing out at others, just “carrying on cranky,” to quote a famous Minbari. I quickly abandoned rule number one as unworkable.

When we arrived at Motel 6, Tom asked if they allowed pets. When they replied that they did, Tom did not inquire as to how many. So we boxed up the kitties and I snuck them into my room two at a time. I nearly panicked when several started meowing loudly for dinner, fearing that the people in the room next to me would be alerted to my crime. I fed the cats as fast as possible and then let them out of their carriers.

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat. –Mark Twain

Six of the cats had urinated and two had defecated on the towels in their carriers. After dinner they loaded up the litter box with an unimaginable volume of waste. In the morning the box was again full of loathsome smelling canned food feces.

The more inquisitive cats inspected every bit of the room while the shy ones hid underneath the beds. About six cats tried to sleep with me, four of them vying for coveted positions under the covers. Lyla snuggled against my head. Halfway through the night I awoke to Puddy digging through the garbage for the lids to the canned cat food. After I put that away he discovered the cat food cans in another bag. I bundled that up and put it on a high shelf. I slept poorly that night.

Can you see six cats?

The next morning Mike suggested we break down a few boxes and let the cats roam. This worked really well, and he eventually perfected the system. We broke down all but three carriers and provided a clear path to the litter box and the water bowl. My two black cats, Toby and TipToe, monopolized my lap and became aggressive when challenged or forced to share. Agnes spent one full day in the litter box and the other two days in a carrier with Arthur and Pinegar.

Four cats up front and Chester at my feet

A pillow was placed on top of belongings behind my seat and another on the middle console. The cat occupying the middle console became the gatekeeper to the lap, so cats had to sneak to my lap via my right shoulder. The front of the car eventually filled with cats: two on the middle console pillow, two on my lap, and one tucked into my shirt front. Chester was fascinated by the floorspace with the pedals at Tom’s feet and made repeated dashes but was redirected to my floorspace.

So that’s how we traveled four days from Oregon to Pennsylvania. We stayed at Motel 6′s for three nights, and the rooms were almost identical, so this reduced cat inspection time significantly. It’s amazing how resilient and adaptable cats can be.

How to move ten cats from Oregon to Pennsylvania?

My original intent was to drive the cats in my Mazda Speed 6 and tent camp along the way. I wrote about the problems with the trial run in the tent in an earlier post. When I realized camping wouldn’t work, I tried to buy a van, but I couldn’t get financing.

The airlines required all cats be vaccinated and certified healthy by a veterinarian. I refuse to vaccinate on my cats, and I wasn’t in a position to pay to have ten cats examined let alone flown cross country.

Then I called car rental agencies for information on their payment policies. I could pay with cash, check or credit card. If I used anything but a credit card, the agency would run a credit check. If my credit was below a certain threshold, they wouldn’t lend me a car. I might drive off to Mexico with it. So that was out.

The only option left me was to ask my friend Tom to fly out, rent a car and drive back with me, which he did. Tom and his partner Mike flew into Portland on Sunday, November 2, and rented a vehicle. Tom was supposed to rent a van, but the agency suggested that an SUV would provide more space.

My friend Robbie and I drove up to Portland to meet them and also because in all the time I lived in Oregon I had never seen Powell’s Books. Their inventory is approximately 70 percent used and their store consists of several floors, the various sections color-coded so you don’t get lost. I bought five books from the health section.

Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon

Robbie and I then drove to the airport to meet Tom and Mike, and we led the way to Jakes Restaurant for dinner (which I have just discovered is supposedly one of the top ten seafood restaurants in the nation). The food was delicious, especially the sourdough, and the company was even more delicious. Good friends breaking bread.

Marshall brings my last Caesar salad

Monday morning Tom and Mike helped me load my remaining belongings onto the second trailer. We visited Robbie’s Windowbox Cafe. Robbie’s is where I met the people who would later become my friends.

If you’re looking for a place to meet people in Veneta, have a great cup of coffee, use free wireless Internet, talk or debate with intelligent people, then Robbie’s is where you go. Stop by some early morning and be entertained as the locals argue politics, current events, whatever. And jump right into the conversation. They won’t mind. I miss Robbie and her shop most of all.

Our Daily Bread

We three, along with a friend named George, then went to lunch at Our Daily Bread where I ordered my favorite Caesar salad from my favorite waiter, Marshall. Our Daily Bread is a small restaurant on Territorial Road housed in a renovated church. The food is good (not great) and the ambiance and service are excellent. I recommend the Caesar salad (light on the dressing), the McKenzie Omelet and the Featherbenders Grill sandwich. (Watch out for the soups. The cook relies on heavy cream to flavor and thicken most of them.)

Now it was time to load ten cats into an SUV and depart Oregon.

Continue to Part II.

I’ll be down to ten cats when I leave, because I found someone to take Boy.

I feed the cats in the evening now to get them all in, but Boy began howling at the window after dinner so I started letting him out. He prefers being outside and hunting. Boy is a wild little man-cat.

When I get ready for bed I go out and call Boy. Usually I hear him calling out to me from the dark, and then he comes out of the bushes and slowly makes his way to me, talking the entire while. He’ll pause and shake his rear and tail like he’s going to spray. Sometimes he plops down on his side inviting me to rub him.

A few times he hasn’t come home at night but usually he just shows up at the back door around eleven o’clock (tripping the motion sensor light) with a live rodent, which I let loose to live another day.

Boy was the last of the shelter kittens I fostered. He entered my home with nine others foster kittens and the mother of five of them. I kept Boy, and his sisters Babette and Minky. But I returned Babette and Minky to the shelter, because one of them was peeing in my silverware strainer and in bowls. It was too much on top of ten cats. No foster kittens are euthanized, and the shelter informs me they were adopted out as barn cats. Sometimes during the night Boy pees on the kitchen counter. I wonder if even cats can understand that bizarre behavior. The kitchen counter, Boy? What gives?

Boy would not do well locked in an apartment. He’s just too wild. So I’ve found him a barn to live in. The woman who is taking him needs a good mouser. I’m going to miss Boy, but he’ll be much happier being a country cat.

I’ve been transitioning him to a canned food that is affordable but contains no meat products. Unfortunately, it does contain grain. I’m hoping the new owner will continue to feed him canned food and not dry. She’ll probably vaccinate him, too, which is a shame. He’s over two years old and hasn’t been sick a day. He’s extremely healthy and I dread thinking of veterinarians injecting him with toxins.

Young Boy

I haven’t seen him since, and I haven’t found his calling card (a dead rodent) anywhere.

I’ve had a feeling for many months that Boy wasn’t coming with us. The kind of feeling that made me check the road every time I drove home expecting Boy to be lying dead on it.

I asked a woman to ask around for another home so he could live outside, and I was so pleased when she found one. I thought that’s why I was feeling bad about him not coming. But now, I don’t know.

Did someone or something kill him? He’s never been gone more than 24 hours. If he found himself a home, I’d be very happy for him. But not knowing makes me sad. What happens if he’s just roaming and he comes home in three weeks to find me gone?

Come home, Boy.

Since we’ll be traveling cross-country and the food supply in Pennsylvania is uncertain, I’ve been switching my cats to Wellness canned food. I added one can to three pounds raw. Then went to two cans and two pounds raw, and so on.

Everyone loved it but Sophie and Arthur. When Sophie first stuck her nose to the food she pulled back, somewhat startled. Then she ran to her sister’s Agnes’s bowl hoping to find food there. But the same awful smell greeted her. She turned in a circle and tried her bowl again. (Imagine how you would react if you put your nose to a hot stove.) A few more circles and eventually she began eating, slowly. I had to lock her in a cat carrier because she took so long to eat and Agnes would finish before her and try to eat her food.

Arthur refused to eat it. Especially the beef and chicken mixture. He eventually gave in and ate the turkey but still doesn’t devour it like he did the raw food. He’s making up for it by eating as many mice as possible. He caught another one yesterday. The poor thing fought for its life with a flap of flesh hanging off. Two days ago I smashed Arthur’s second mouse’s head in with a rock because I couldn’t stand to see it suffer. I would have set it free but it had a broken leg.

Why do cats have to play with their food? That and spraying are two things about cats that are troubling to me as a human.

TipToe is in heaven again. She went from leisurely dining on raw to voracious inhalation. Put dry food in front of her and you’ll see her turn into a starving beast! She used to be obese, and it took me a year to get her slimmed down. But she now has a hellacious case of diarrhea.

The raw food I buy comes in frozen two pound chubs (plastic tubes) and includes bone. I have to thaw the meat and then I put it in a pot on a very low setting to warm, being careful not to cook it. (When I had only six cats I put the meat in baggies and warmed it in hot water.) I add pureed organic vegetables, such as broccoli, cabbage, carrot, zucchini, lettuce and maybe add some fish oil, granulated seaweed or digestive enzymes. Every week or so I include a can of sardines or some raw egg yolks. A couple times a week I add chopped organ meat, like chicken livers and giblets, beef kidneys or heart, turkey giblets. It’s a lot of work and it takes about half an hour every night.

Opening a few cans of cat food and partioning it into bowls is so much easier and quicker. I love it. But I hate the smell. Canned cat food is offensive. Raw meat has practically no smell. And now every week I have a serious collection of empty cans.

And when the canned food comes out the back end of the cat? Yuck. I’ve been feeding raw for seven years now and I’ve gotten used to not knowing when my cats are having bowel movements. A raw food turd is like a compacted, solid piece of powder, often light in color, and it turns white in the sun. I can pick it up (yes, with gloves or a paper towel) and smell only a slight odor. If I break it, it crumbles into a powder.

The feces now are oily looking and dark brown. I found one in the backyard and poked at it with a pinecone. Then I smelled it. I gagged and wretched, it was so bad. I can only imagine what the cats’ stomachs and intestines feel like with this putrefying mass of protein inside. When the cats are finished eating I pick them up and lock them in the sunroom so everyone still eating is unmolested. Just about every cat’s stomach makes noice and they belch.

Cooked proteins are not the same as raw proteins. Their molecules have been rearranged and damaged. I’m assuming much of this protein is not being metabolized and is thus putrefying. Meat was never meant to be cooked. Nothing was, really. Some benefits of cooking food have allowed our species to cover the globe and live in inhospitable climates. But we pay a price every time we cook our food.

The cats are consuming a lot of water now, too. When they were on raw, I could leave a bowl of water out and it could sit for a week if I let it without much loss. Now I have to fill the bowl every day. It was even worse when I added a little dry food to the raw. I added one cup of high quality dry food to three pounds raw and the cats emptied the water bowl in less than a day. I have vowed never to feed them dry food because of that.

When I get to Pennsylvania, I may just put them on raw food again, despite the cost and time, if I can find a good source of meat. I’ve even thought of raising my own mice. I told someone that I didn’t know how to kill such a thing. She suggested putting them in a jar of water and shaking really hard. I don’t know about that. I also considered raising rabbits. Nobody can live on rabbits because they’re too lean. But they’d work for half the diet. But a friend tells me I better not because I’ll end up with fifty pet rabbits.

For the first time in my life I see the value of roadkill. I used to think it impossible for anyone to view roadkill as anything other than pathetic loss of life. It’s sad, yes, especially when the animal rots unused, but when it comes to feeding my family, that roadkill’s looking pretty tempting.

There’s nothing like a good dose of unemployment and pending poverty to put things into perspective for haughty, self-righteous people like me. I needed this experience. It’s allowed me to see another side.

Wal-Mart is starting to look good. Organic growers are viewed as greedy. How fresh is that roadkill? I have new respect for hunters. Not the ones who pose for the camera with a big smile and their foot on a fresh kill, but the ones who feed their family an entire year on a deer or two. I’m going to learn to fish and hunt with a bow. It seems more honest to me to kill my own meat than rely on someone else to do the dirty work.

I pitched my new 8-man tent in the backyard and thought I’d get the cats used to sleeping in it. I put in two clean litter boxes, a bowl of water, a couple cat beds, a scratching pad, a big blanket for the cats and my sleeping bag and pillow. I thought it best to try out just the younger cats: Sophie, Agnes, Chester, Puddy, Arthur and Pinegar.

Disaster in the making?

After the cats were in the tent I went to gather reading material, flashlight, gun and water bottle. When I opened the tent door to put these in, Agnes made a bolt for freedom. I grabbed her and pushed her back in. When she tried again I sprayed her, with no effect. She tried to push through the spray of water. I grabbed again and pushed her in. Bolt, spray, grab and hold this time. She was determined to get out despite the spray of water, so I had to hold her until I and my belongings were in the tent. Then she hunkered down into a compact mass until morning. Her dear friend Chester tried to groom her, but Agnes lashed out at her.

Agnes’s sister Sophie was even more miserable over the accommodations. She prowled along the edge of the tent, reaching up the walls looking for a way out. Growling, hissing, spitting, completely agitated by her new surroundings. This went on for a long time and nobody went near Sophie. She eventually settled down inside a carrier.

Arthur approves

The tent floor is not made of nylon like the walls but of the same material those cheap, blue tarps are made of. It crinkles. Loudly. Imagine how impossible it was going to sleep until they settled down. I was also lying on what seemed like a miniature hillock. On one hand it was very uncomfortable. On the other, I relished the opportunity to type the word “hillock,” something I’ve yet to do in my lifetime. Well, there it is. Hillock. I finally found a spot that was neither hillock nor valley and where my pillow was at the same level as my bag. I dozed off only to wake shortly in a full sweat, my shirt half drenched.

My home is a little over half a mile from a busy sawmill, which runs until early morning. As I was trying to enjoy the crickets I kept hearing the jarring sound of planks of wood landing on other planks of wood, along with machinery and forklifts. Not exactly a relaxing, peaceful camping experience. It was stressful for all involved, and I probably got three or four hours of sleep total.

Agnes aka Aggie Panthus

One thing about cats is you don’t want to let them do once what you don’t want them doing forever. Now that they knew the exit, would I be able to keep them inside? The tent door zipper is laid out like an inverted T, and the zipper pulls all join at the bottom. One forceful, determined nose can probably push its way through that tiny hole and open up the zippers. Am I going to have to use a little suitcase lock to hold the zippers together? Oh my. How will I ever drive across country with 11 cats???

Most have suspected it. It’s confirmed. I am insane.