Keep threads of all kinds fully inaccessible to cats inside the home

This is a story, ultimately, about keeping your home tidy! I don't mean overly tidy but I do mean keeping stuff off the floor particularly threads of cotton or string which your cat might find attractive to chew and swallow. Domestic as do have a habit of eating stuff on the floor. It might be a dead fly or a bit of the fur that you have combed off your cat and it might just as well be some thread which for some reason or other ended up on the floor and you missed it.

The story tells me that cat owners simply must make sure that there are no threads lying around the floor in the home if you've got a cat or cats. Or make sure threads are inaccessible if they are somewhere else.

Orlando who ate a long thread that causes serious problems for cat and owner alike. Image: Orlando's owners.

Orlando

In this story, a cat called Orlando (a quirky soul) living with a woman and her female partner in a multi-cat home in Sussex, UK managed somehow to ingest a very long black thread. Orlando's owners don't know how she got it or where it came from but it must have been inside their home. We don't know what their home looks like so I can't comment.

But once Orlando had eaten the thread everything went downhill from that point. Another unfortunate aspect of the story is that after Orlando became ill and stopped eating, they took her to the local veterinarian who gave her anti-sickness pill because she was being sick. The vet then sent her home. That obviously didn't fix the problem. Is that an example of poor veterinary service? 

Test for foreign body?

Clearly the lesson there is that vets should by default check for foreign bodies which means doing some tests I am afraid. The tests would have been covered by the owners' pet health insurance policy.

The owners then took Orlando to another vet who did some blood tests. Neither veterinarian could see the thread that had gone right down into her intestines and perforated them in two places.

Orlando remained ill and was kept in by the second veterinary clinic who wisely did an ultrasound diagnosis and discovered the thread inside her body.

Read the insurance policy in full!

The next problem was this: Orlando's owners had a pet health insurance policy but it had a maximum expenditure of £4,000 a year. The operation to remove the thread, which in itself was life-threatening, and ancilliary care cost £7,000.

So, the owners are £3000 out of pocket. What did they do? They went online and set up a crowdfunding page to ask the public to give them £3000. I find that unacceptable myself. Begging the public for help when, on the face of it, the problem was careless cat ownership.

And if you can't afford to look after your cat properly then don't have cats. I am being tough but I don't think it is right to go to the public to help you pay for your cat's health expenses.

Orlando is recovering. As expected, as soon as the thread was removed, she started to improve although there was a short phase afterwards when she had a fever with a 40°C temperature and remained ill until the fever subsided.

One of the cat's owners is disabled and is cared for by her wife. They say that a lot of lovely people have donated to the fund and the veterinary clinic couldn't have been better.

Check the home for potential 'foreign bodies'

In this article I have focused upon the problem that caused all these other problem which is that a long thread was left somewhere within the house in a place where it was accessible to one of their cat namely Orlando. That's the error and it's a minor error I guess but it is one which caused major problems. 

Every cat owner should go around the house and make sure that it is tidied up and that there are no threads of any shape, size or length within the home they can be accessed by a cat or cats.

The story is also a lesson about pet health insurance. The owners didn't know that their insurance policy had a £4000 limit. Nobody wants to read these horrible policy documents but you have to if you pay monthly insurance premiums which are not cheap because what's the point of having one if it doesn't cover the cost?

Cat ate 38 hair ties and survived

NEWS AND COMMENT: As reported in The State, a cat was abandoned with other cats by their owner when they moved away. And this particular cat was very ill. She was brought to an animal shelter run by the Charleston Animal Society. It is located about 9 miles north-west of Charleston and is a No-kill shelter with a hospital which cares for around 20,000 animals annually.

UPDATE: THE CAT DIED. SIGH

Sick cat after operation to remove 38 hair ties from her stomach. Image: Charleston Animal Society from video (screenshot).

This cat was therefore fortunate to end up at this shelter where she stopped eating. They x-rayed her and found a massive blockage in her stomach. Her stomach was completely full of ties. A domestic cat's stomach is quite small at about the size of a ping pong ball I am told. How do you get 38 hair ties inside a stomach that size!? It must stretch a lot.

The blockage constituted 38 hair ties which she had obviously eaten as if they were edible foods when in the ownership of the people who abandoned her.

The veterinarian who did the operation was very surprised to see that number of hair ties in her stomach. The associate director of veterinary care at the Charleston Animal Society, Leigh Jamison, said: 

"I've never seen anything like that."

The animal hospital was so taken aback by the finding that they took time to photograph the ties and here they are below.

The 38 hair ties removed from the cat's stomach. Photo: Charleston Animal Society Charleston Animal Society

Fortunately, her intestine is were not damaged but the obstruction to her digestive tract caused fat to build up in her liver which resulted in a major health issue. She is currently being fed through a feeding tube.

They are keeping up her electrolytes to ensure that they are in balance and she is improving but she is not out of the woods yet, they report.

Comment: one doesn't want to criticise but for a cat owner to allow their cat to eat 38 hair ties and then abandon them is beyond careless. It is callous and cruel. The woman (presumed woman but it might have been a man) must have noticed her hair ties going missing. She must have seen her cat playing with the ties and eating them but did nothing about it.

And of course, it does bring to mind the dangers of hair ties and objects like them. Cats like to play with small, elastic objects. They are an ideal size as a cat toy. And as cat play is play-hunting, the end result is going to be eating the object if possible. And it is possible for a domestic cat eat a hair tie but of course they remain undigested in the stomach.

The obvious moral to the story is that a cat owner who uses her ties should make sure that they are not left lying around the floor or in any other place which is accessible to their cat. Obvious stuff. Nothing extraordinary in that statement (and it has been said a million times before) but if - as this person was - the owner is careless and doesn't care about the health and welfare of a cat you can end up killing your cat.

It seems purely fortuitous that this cat ended up at a cat shelter where there was an animal hospital attached. The story might well have ended completely differently and tragically but for that simple fact.

Here is a video which might or might not run! It may stop working. But if not great.