Polly Update

I've blogged a couple of times about Polly, our Tortoiseshell kitty.  She was "interesting" when we first got her and I got to learn the meaning of "tortitude".

We got her last September and as expected she slowly started to warm up to the other pets, but we were still having some big problems, namely she would attack the other cat (out of the blue) and she enjoyed peeing on the dog's bed.

This simply would not do, but I'm not one to give up so easily and dump her back at the shelter.  We were the second home she had been placed with from the Idaho Humane Society and we thought maybe some of her problems stemmed from not having a stable home.

After an incident where we thought Polly might have had a bladder infection....turns up she was just trying real hard to get every last drop of urine onto the dog bed....the doctor suggested we put her on some kitty prozac.

We were hoping to avoid drugs, but in the end we relented.

It ends up putting Polly on the generic version of Prozac was exactly what she needed.  It was a bit of a pain to crush up her 1/2 pill, mix it into a little warmed food, and get her to eat it.  OK, the first two parts were relatively easy, it was the getting her to eat it that was hard.  Some food she's eat readily...for a while.  Sometimes I could mix in some chicken broth and she'd lap it up...other times it was "meh".  We even tried braunschweiger.  I have never known a cat or dog that would turn down braunschweiger....until Polly.  Sure...she would eat it sometimes.


We were getting ready to go on a weekend trip and it occurred to me that Polly really hadn't eaten her food in nearly a week.  She still eats from the other cat's bowl and drinks from the dog's dish, but she hadn't been consuming her medicine-laced food.  We instructed our house-sitters to not bother giving Polly her meds and when we came back after the weekend, Polly had been off the Fluoxetine for at least a week an half......


....and she was a new kitty.  She's been more affectionate, nicer....I dare say friendly...to the other pets, and she seems a bit more tolerant of everything in general.  She's really becoming the cat I really wanted...and was drawn to in the first place.