Basic Cat Care - Protecting Your Cat from Health Problems

Taking care of your cat requires that you provide it with the lifestyle that suits its needs. Besides water and food, taking proper care of your cat includes keeping your cat safe from harmful situations (such as neighborhood dogs or wandering coyotes or disease) and keeping your cat safe from fleas, ticks, and disease.

When choosing a pet, remember to take into account the time and energy you have to care for your animal. Cats do not need as much interaction with people as dogs, but they still need your companionship each day. If you are at work all day, socializing all evening, and taking mini-vacations on weekends, having a cat is not for you.

Dangers

The primary cause of early cat mortality and development of infectious disease is from their unsupervised outdoor wanderings. If at all possible, it is better to keep your cat indoors where they are safe from cars, neighborhood dogs, coyotes, and other cats.

Diseases

Feline Infectious Peritonitis is a common disease among cats and kittens. It starts out as a mutation of the corona virus. Cats can live with that virus remaining quietly in the intestines with no sign of disease for their entire lifetime.

However, in some cats it will mutate into FIP. The cat or kitten will exhibit sneezing, watery eyes, and nasal discharge. A trip to the vet to get an antibiotic should clear this up very quickly.

Feline Leukemia Virus used to be very widespread. With many kittens getting the vaccination in recent years, the cases of this disease is shrinking. As long as a cat or kitten has been vaccinated, they are protected from getting this disease.

Although the disease is not always immediately fatal, cats with Feline Leukemia rarely have a long life expectancy. If you have a cat or kitten with FLV, be sure you don’t bring another cat into your home.

Fleas

Fleas ingest animals’ blood, and the bloodsuckers can actually consume so much that some cats die of blood loss. Fleas and ticks are dangerous disease carriers that can make your cat’s life miserable.

Therefore it is important that you combat the fleas with something such as Frontline for cats. With all the flea-killing products available today there is no reason that you cat needs to suffer.

One interesting note about fleas is that it was finally discovered that fleas causing the deaths of about millions of people during the Great Plague (or Black Plague) in Europe during the Middle Ages. At first it was thought the fleas were coming from dogs and cats, and so in London the mayor ordered that every dog and cat be killed.

Since rats were the real culprits, that just made it worse. The people who had not killed their cats now survived better than the people who had no cats or dogs left to kill the rats.

The truth was finally realized and the cat was raised to hero status as they went around killing the rats. Just another example of human interference causing a problem to grow instead of diminish.

Conclusion

Cats adjust well to indoor living, take great care in grooming themselves, and are easily trained to use a cat box. For these reasons, having a cat is much easier than having a dog. They are also much quieter and often allowed in an apartment complex where dogs are not allowed.

Yet cats are not for everyone. If you can live with a creature that treats you with affection one moment and indifference the next, you will enjoy having a cat.