Scamp is looking awfully good with her full winter coat.  We haven’t had much time to “train” her or play with her–we’ve been pretty busy with Junior, trying to get him healthy and keep him that way.   As you may recall, he started out with constipation and he also had either a urinary tract infection or it came along the way shortly after.  We got the constipation cleared up (a tiny bit of aloe vera in his food) but the infection/irritation set in with a vengence.  Off to the vet we went.

The antibiotics helped, but not quickly.  Little guy was pretty uncomfortable for the better part of a week.  He was obviously getting used to us, as you can see by the picture (he’s always in motion, thus his pictures are always blurry!)  Once we had to handle him at the vet, he seemed to get used to the idea that we weren’t actually attacking. He still scampers if either of us make sudden moves, but he’s quite playful and generally trusting.

After almost a week of antibiotics, Junior got diarrhea…so it was off to Walgreens to get some yogurt and metamucil.  That is probably helping, although, keep in mind, he is a mostly outdoor cat so these things can be very hard to track.  And frankly, who wants to know that much about their pet’s pooping habits???  Yes, yes, I know.  It’s one of the only ways to monitor their health.  Still.

Junior has had a variety of “diets” as we try to get him balanced.  I’ve made him a batch of chicken and chicken livers with gravy (He loves that.  He will take any medicine in it without a single complaint, which is a LOT easier than trying to shove pills down or liquids).  He also gets plenty of fluids from this smelly mess of food.  (I didn’t even know they sold chicken livers in the store before this…)

We learned that giving cats medicine is actually easier if you get the regular medicine–not the stuff for children and pets, which tends to have banana or bubblegum flavor.  The smell is so strong, the cats instantly reject it.  The slight bitter taste of amoxicillin with no additives?  He never seemed to know it was there.  We also put some dried cranberry pills in his food–never a complaint.  We don’t know that craberry will help him at all (it never did a thing for me when I had such an infection!) but there are people that praise the stuff quite highly for soothing the bladder and helping keep certain bacterias from growing.

We also gave him some pumpkin, but either he wasn’t getting enough of it (how much do you give a 4 pound kitten anyway?) or it just didn’t help get his pooping system back to normal.  There are a number of people that swear by it for normalizing the poop.

So the feral cats aren’t *quite* so feral these days, at least the kitten.  Scamp has a ways to go.  She watches pretty carefully when we pet Junior, but does not look at all jealous.   She plays with the toy and the catnip, but not with a great deal of enthusiasm.  She’s a good cat, but she’s still all cat at this point–not crossing over into human territory just yet.