The King

This is the month we have to start all of the cats and dogs on their flea/tic/heartworm/etc. stuff. I HATE putting those chemicals on the crew, but I think I would hate more being infested with fleas or having one of the babies get heartworm. It is very expensive. Though all there is to it is squirting the tube contents onto the back of their necks, some of them are surprisingly squirrely about it! I'm glad it's done for a month.

Ivan started taking kitty Prozac on Friday. He will need to take it for three weeks before we can expect to see if it is helping. I’ve been considering this option for a few months, and it is definitely a last resort. His grumpiness and growling just gets worse and worse. He’s great with me. As long as he’s near me, he is the happiest most contented little normal cat you could imagine. He loves the immediate family but dislikes most other people and almost all cats. He has become more and more fearful through the years, and his growling whenever another cat moves has elevated to growling at imaginary things, even when he’s the only cat in a closed room!

His behavior has gone from being a major irritation to me to really distressing me. He is terrified of everything, and it seems like he’s now terrified of things nobody else is aware of—poor crazy little guy. He’s perfectly healthy. His strange personality has been attributable to “singleton syndrome,” which affects kittens who are not raised with siblings. I can accept his strangeness and difficult personality but I don’t think he is happy. I want him to be happy more often than when he is touching me. I don’t want to change him or his brain, but I can’t leave him in this unhappy state.

If he was my human child, I would explain to him how his brain works and how the chemicals and the electrical pulses are causing him to feel this way. We could work on a plan for being aware of these thoughts and feelings and ways to counteract or work around them. While he and I communicate astoundingly well (you should see it actually—it’s quite amazing), I’m pretty sure this approach isn’t going to help his little cat brain. I’ve done all of the environmental modifications I can think of, and so this is truly a last resort for him.

I have a months’ worth, so by the time we run out of pills, I should be able to tell if it is helping, hurting or doing nothing. If they help him, I will continue them for a while, to see if we can just rewire his brain circuitry a bit. He may be able to come off them in the future—at least that’s my hope. If it doesn’t seem like he is any happier or more relaxed, then I will… I have no idea, but I’m sure I will find something else to try. He’s my baby and he deserves to be happy!

It’s very frustrating for me to not be able to get into the heads of my non-human animals! I try so hard but nothing I do will allow me to see and experience the world exactly as they do. I know I have a far better idea of their world than most other humans, just because it is so very important to me and I spend so much time and energy on it. Ultimately, the better I understand them, the happier I can make them, and that is so important to me. Besides that, it’s just damn interesting to be able to see and experience the world from different points of view, whether human or non-human animal.