Hi, I’m new to the forum and was wondering if you might be able to help me with some advice (I don’t know if this is the right category - let me know if you think it would be better suited elsewhere) It’s a bit of an essay, I apologise in advance!
Me and my partner have a three year old partially deaf cat, named Dana. We adopted her from the RSPCA when she was a kitten, and we keep her as a house cat.
The dilemma I have is that we’ve been invited to go on holiday for 10 days in June, and Dana hates going in the cattery. When she’s there she doesn’t eat much, won’t leave her carrier, repeatedly tries to escape and attacks anyone who enters her pen. (I should say, it’s a very nice cattery and well managed, the lady who runs it did our home visit when we adopted Dana, so it’s not an issue with the cattery itself.) She’s also fine as soon as she gets home, and is back to her usual self the following day.
The obvious solution would be a pet sitter, but Dana’s very nervous of strangers, I think probably in part due to her partial deafness. When we have friends round for example, she stays upstairs most of the time, and on the rare occasion she does come downstairs she’s very jumpy, hesitant and keeps a fair distance.
To add to the problem, she also has an abundance of excess energy - she has lots of toys she plays with on her own, and we engage her in interactive play 2-3 times a day, if she doesn’t get played with she starts to chew and eat plastic things (she especially loves cellophane
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). I know she won’t play with a stranger as we’ve tried getting her to play with the friends/family members she’s most comfortable with and she has absolutely none of it. If we were only going away for a few days I think having someone in to feed her would be fine, but I’m really nervous of leaving her for longer than that incase she chews and eats something she shouldn’t - if a pet sitter only comes in twice a day and Dana hides the entire time they’re there, they might not even realise there’s something wrong or if she’s eaten something unsafe.
I don’t know if, under those circumstances, the cattery might be better, as at least she’s safe, even if she doesn’t like it??
We’ve tried Zyklene on our vets reccomendation, which did help a little the first time we used it, but didn’t help the second time when we went away last summer. We gave her 75mg once a day, for three weeks leading up to her cattery stay, and then the cattery owner gave it to her while she was there. I didn’t know if I should try a higher dosage? We haven’t tried Feliway, I don’t know if that could be an option?
I love her so much, I want to cause her as little undue stress as possible, and I feel awful and guilty for doing anything that could upset her. My boyfriend’s saying we should just stay at home and not go, but even devoted cat owners need a rest and some sun sometimes!
Sorry for writing an essay - any help or opinions would be wonderful, thank you for reading
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