The MLP Arena
Pony Talk => Off Topic => Topic started by: Skeen on October 27, 2016, 03:11:23 PM
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One of my little fosters, Christine Perfect, likely has it. Barring MRIs and CAT scans we're not going to do, there's no 100% diagnosis but she shows all the signs. And she is freaking adorable!
So if your cat has/had it, how did you help them compensate? She's a tiny little thing, just over a pound at 12 weeks (she's the runt by a wide margin) and she runs all over trying to play with her bigger and more coordinated siblings. Are there any exercises or things I could do with her to help her out?
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YES!!!
Our cat OLIVE has that! She is the sweetest cat on the planet! She really is the best cat! (Don't tell my other kitties, haha)
She did break a lot of thinks when she was a kitten, but she knows her limits now that she is an old lady :D She walks really bow-legged to compensate. I think they kind of teach themselves how to get along the older they get.
I guess cats with this condition vary in how bad it is- but generally the only advice I have is:
* make things easier for her to climb/get at (like a staircase of boxes to a cat perch) - if she is young, she doesn't know her limits and she is going to be falling off of stuff a LOT. Even the sofa. Even the bed. Heck, our cat falls right off of her feet...
* don't leave things on tables/dressers/ect. that she can get at- that
are easily broken. She will break them...
Because our cat can't see or pounce like a normal cat- I play with her using really BIG easy to see and catch things- like the belt from my robe (really big really easy to swat). Smaller things (typical cat toys) are very hard for her to catch and it seems to discourage her...
Our cat (who is 15 and no spring chicken) has a lot of arthritis and sore muscles because of the way she walks (to compensate for her lack of balance). I learned how to do a "cat massage" and she really likes it. Her poor little shoulders get very bunched up.
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Yes :) Angel has this! I got her as an adult cat with it, I wasn't sure at all what was wrong with her, I had to find out myself. I got her from the RSPCA as a cruelty case, so nobody knew really what had happened to her.
It isn't degenerate and if anything she will improve as she learns to compensate and build muscle. There are different grades of CH, I'd place Angel mild-medium.
I personally suggest a low sided large litter tray, with only a little litter in. Litter is tricky as it slips about under paws making kitty more likely to slip. I also have puppy pads around her tray as she doesn't always get her butt in the right place! Also she finds it hard to squat, so she'll pee stood up!
Place food and water about a foot apart, Angel has been known to fall in her water bowl. Some people raise the food bowls as CH cats don't do the loaf pose when they eat.
Angel does go out, but the garden is fully secure and she is never out alone. There is no way she'd ever be able to jump or run away from anything that could hurt or chase her.
Angel has knocked on of her teeth out (her only remaining tooth) from a small fall of about a foot. They don't have the same ability to land on their feet, so you are going to have to treat sprains and strains.
I agree that massage is good, I use a Kong grooming tool and Angel loves it. Angel also has a touch of arthritis too.
This website is helpful, but by the time I found it, I'd already been dealing with Angel for 6 years and figured everything out
https://lifewithchcats.com
I guess the only thing you need to do is love her ;)
Love pkw xxx
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This story came across my Facebook feed just a few minutes ago, very timely :) http://blog.theanimalrescuesite.com/tippy-the-kitten/?utm_source=ars-arsfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=20161026&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=tippy-the-kitten&origin=ars_arsfan_social_fb_link_tippy-the-kitten_20161026
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THANK YOU ladies! :) Even my vet has never seen a case in all her years of practice.
Christine has NO IDEA she is any different than the others. She can jump like a bunny and really only seems to have problems when she's really excited - the head tremors are more noticeable then. Here she is at about 12 weeks. You can see how small she is!
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Aww, she's a sweetie.
Our vet had never seen it before either. It doesn't seem to cause any adverse health issues other than clumsiness.
Olive is also not the....er, brightest cat around. But I don't know if that has anything to do with her condition or not.
Her eyes are also extra super OPEN so we say she looks like a homicidal maniac- which is just funny because she may be the sweetest cat in existence.
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LOL Dumb cats are the best cats, for sure. :D
Christine, however, was the first one to figure out how to get out of her litter's enclosure, and then was small enough to fit under the door to the room so I would find her randomly in the house. Take a shower, get out, there's Christine. Come home from work, there's Christine. Wake up, there's Christine wondering why she hasn't been fed. My big cats are so scared of her! She hasn't gotten a lot bigger but she's started to look more like an older cat and has lost a lot of that big watery eyed kitten look.
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She's so cute Skeen :heart:
I've read that whole litters can be affected with the kittens each been affect to varying degrees. This would explain why the other kittens in her litter appear to be unaffected.
Angel has a slight head tremor. She has a "legs far apart" stance when she sits and stands and her back end "Jack knives" when she walks. The muscles are also atrophied in her back end as well. She also has round eyes!
It's a good idea to keep her weight managed, if she gets chubby it will be harder for her to cope.
Does she "peck" when she eats?
Love pkw xxx
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Oh yeah- regarding eating- if you cat does the "pecking" thing -
We give Olive her food and water on plastic place mats. She pecks her food and falls into her water- and generally makes a mess like cookie monster...
I don't know if this is related- but Olive also is very easily startled- and has a hard time sleeping. She tends to look for very dark corners to sleep in (and she used to climb under the comforter).
It does mean she sometimes crawls into places no cat has been before...(she tried out the fireplace once... sigh)
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She also has a little trouble sleeping- we've noticed that she seeks the darkest corners for sleep, and gets grumpy as she gets more tired. There is something a
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Christine came in a litter of 6 and is one of 4 survivors. Her 3 brothers have no signs of CH and are all 2-3x bigger than she is. We don't know why she's so small but she doesn't really weigh enough to draw a lot of blood so there aren't many tests we can do.
No, she doesn't peck her food. She inhales it! Much better table manners than her pig brothers. Her front half seems a lot less affected than her back half - PKW, she also randomly flops over while walking. It's actually better the faster she's going. Last night I watched her dash across the room and leap onto the ladder on a cat tree. She was so small her back half just swung through the opening but she held on and climbed the whole thing. I'd say she's a bit splayed legged when walking but she's also shaped like a 5 week old kitten still, and they walk funny anyway so it's hard to say how much of it is that or is due to CH. She climbs everything and she's really good at jumping. Her most noticeable trait is the head tremor. I used to think she was always cold and tried to keep her on a heating pad, and was baffled why she kept waddling off it to sleep! It stops when she's calm or sleeping.
Absolutely no trouble sleeping (prefers to sleep on me) and she doesn't startle much at all, really. She's pretty fearless. She started a fight with Flora last week and Flora was looking at me like, "MOTHER. SRSLY."
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Sound's like her condition is probably pretty minimal, it may be that you'll never notice much if anything different about her, other than some clumsiness.
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Olive :heart: :heart: that face and those mittens!!! She's so cute Galactica.
Angel's front end is better than her back end too :) she does stop with a bump and still crash her butt down when she sits! When I first got Angel she did used to flip flop down while trying to walk, bless her, she was hardly mobile when we took her home. Seven years of being able to move about and not being in a cage helped her mobility greatly.
Stress makes it worse, at least with Angel. Angel is much more wobbly at the vets or cattery than at home.
Angel is a good sleeper and quite calm for the most part :)
I forgot to say Angel needs carpet or flooring with some traction, or its ice skating kitty!
It's so difficult with rescues to figure out what's happening with them.
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i have herd about it and seen clips of kittens with it i haven't had a cat with wobbly cat syndrome but i think they can get used to it and are able to live quite well if at a slight angle :)
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Galactica, Olive is GORGEOUS! :D
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Your cat is absolutely cute! She is lucky to have a family who cares for her like that, and this, for me, helps a lot a cat or any other animal to feel "normal" and compensate.
My neighbour in Spain had a cat like that, he is very loved, she was about to give him away but as she knew he was like that she decided to keep him with her.
Anyway I never heard about that till today, but as a cat lover, I can relate. You will surely have a wonderful companion there.
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Updating to say that Christine Perfect got a mostly clean bill of health yesterday and was finally heavy enough to have her first round of vaccinations! :D And then she insisted on riding my shoulder all the way home.
We did do an x-ray of her head to rule out any traumatic brain injury causing her wobbliness and found a few darker areas on the scan that the vet couldn't immediately explain, but she said all visible structures looked well developed and so long as Steen is being an otherwise normal kitten to just treat her as such, and also she was so good for her scans the vet didn't even have to hold her on the table, she just stayed positioned and purring. That's my girl. /proud
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I'm glad she's doing well ^.^
CH is caused by a virus which the pregnant mother cat catches. This virus affects the development of the cerebellum in the kittens. The cerebellum is the part of the brain responsible for coordinating muscle activity. The degree to which the kittens are affected depends on how far along the mother cat is. However it can affect each kitten to varying degrees within a litter. In cats with CH I believe the cerebellum is either smaller or shows sign of damage. I'm no vet, so I have no idea if it would show on a scan or not. Hopefully your vet will take a good look at the scans and perhaps find an explanation for the darker patches. It may well be related to her being a runt or something that happened at birth and not CH.
On saying all that, the vet is right, just treat her like a regular kitten. She's obviously a really determined little thing....I know Angel is determined:P
Love pkw and Angel xxx
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PKW, she is certainly determined to get into that bag of Cheetos, that's for sure! XD She spent most of yesterday on my shoulder trying to swat my snack out of my hand!
I think I'll make her a shoulder pad thing from maybe some sherpa material so she has something to grip besides my skin.