Friday Cat Blogging

by Bryan

8 comments

1 Badtux { 08.02.13 at 12:54 am }

Surprised he doesn’t have a snorkel and swim floaties, given the weather thereabouts :).

2 Badtux { 08.02.13 at 1:09 am }

This Instructables appears appropriate for your feline population at the moment. Except somehow I doubt that your feral acquaintances will agree ;).

3 Bryan { 08.02.13 at 1:35 am }

Froggie gets to go inside my neighbor’s house if it starts raining.

I would need one of those anti-shark diving suits that are basically stainless steel chainmail, before I would attempt to teach a feral anything, much less swimming.

4 hipparchia { 08.02.13 at 6:48 pm }

curmudgeon cat loved swimming in the bathtub. if i’d had a swimming pool i’d have let him try that too.

i’ve considered trying to teach my present crew how to swim, as a substitute for having to give them medicated flea baths mostly. i’ve been able to give baths to 3 of them so far, without bloodshed, but it’s a lengthy process that involves moving in baby steps and a lot of waiting for the cat to become unnervous at each little step, just like in that instructables post.

5 Bryan { 08.02.13 at 8:15 pm }

I had to give my first cat, Koshka baths because she had a flea allergy, and they hadn’t developed the topical flea treatments. She shredded a genuine Levi denim jacket during the course of the treatments. She clawed the outside when I was wearing it, and sought it out to claw the inside when it was hanging up. She hated it.

I finally developed a system involving a 5-gallon bucket, a hole in the lid for her head to poke through and an inlet and outlet cut into the bucket, so I could circulate warm water through it while her head was out of the water.

I attempted a blow dryer attachment, but she wasn’t going to tolerate that.

I really appreciated Advantage when it was introduced.

6 hipparchia { 08.02.13 at 9:56 pm }

I finally developed a system involving a 5-gallon bucket, a hole in the lid for her head to poke through and an inlet and outlet cut into the bucket, so I could circulate warm water through it while her head was out of the water.

i’ve considered trying something like that myself.

several of my cats go into full paralysis mode when i do the momcat picking them up by the scruff thing. i’ve done a couple of them by holding them over the bathtub, spraying them with one of those fancy shampoo-hose-sprayers, like you can do with pesticides and the garden hose for your grass and flowers, and them spraying them with warm water to rinse (and have ended up using a lot of shampoo that way). i’m pretty sure that the ones i can’t do this to would never let me get them into a bucket (or any other contraption) either.

7 Bryan { 08.02.13 at 10:30 pm }

I would dilute it heavily before I put it into that sprayer, and probably just use Dawn, because the key is to break down the coating on the adult fleas and just washing the larvae and eggs down the drain.

Ivory soap works really well because it is soap, and not detergent, but you have to grate it off a bar and dissolve it in hot water to use it.

What we really need are Phasers that we can set for stun, but no one is interested in those.

8 hipparchia { 08.03.13 at 2:36 am }

Ivory soap works really well because it is soap, and not detergent, but you have to grate it off a bar and dissolve it in hot water to use it.

been there, done that! i used to use it on curmudgeon cat sometimes.