Living in the country with wild animals my pets and domestic livestock are constantly at risk from wild animal born diseases. A case in point is the death of one of the stray cats that visit my place. I lost the mama kitty yesterday who had given me a litter of kittens last spring. She was a little wild stray who showed up last winter to eat with my back porch (supposed to be barn) cats. She stayed around to have a litter of kittens last spring and another this fall. Yesterday morning when I went out to feed the steer and the chickens I found her lying in the driveway, alive but unable to move. I picked her up and laid her on the deck of the bush hog (I had the tractor with me), but she was scared and crying pitifully, so I put her on the grass and went to the house for a card box lined with a blanket that one of the other cats used as a bed sometimes. I gently laid her in the box and brought her into the house. I expected her to die any minute. There was no blood and she was almost a 1/4 of a mile from the road, so I didn't think she'd been hit by a car. I remembered the night before when she came to the porch for supper how big her belly was - like she was pregnant again and ready to give birth. Poison, I thought, or maybe kicked by a cow and internal damage.
I showered and dressed for work as usual but stopped at Lebanon Animal Hospital on the way into town to have Dr. Mead take a look at her. I was pretty sure she wasn't going to recover and I signed papers to have her put to sleep. I left the information about the swelled belly and asked that Dr. Mead take a look at her before they put her down as I really wanted to know what was wrong with her.
Dr. Mead called later in the morning to tell me the kitty had Feline Infectious Peritonitis, an incurable disease caused by a virus. Her swollen belly was full of fluid and she would not recover. I agreed to have her put to sleep and picked up the body after work, burying her next to Walter, my kitty who died this summer of cancer.
She was a feisty little black kitty with huge green eyes and fang like teeth that showed from an undershot jaw line. She was always thin and wylie - and tiny, and I've spent the summer trying to catch her to get her spay (neutered) so she'd stop having kittens! I was never successful at luring her into any cage or hanging on to her long enough to put her in a cage.
I looked up FIP as the vet called it on the Internet. The disease is caused by a virus and is passed in saliva and feces. She probably passed the virus to her kittens but their immune systems seem to have over come it because they are very healthy. Most cats over come the virus by the time they are two or three years old. The disease occurs in a cat with a poor immune system or one that has a serious health issue that compromises its immune system. Mama kitty certainly didn't appear robust. She was always small and skinny and fighting everyone for food. I made sure she and the others had plenty to eat, but I guess it wasn't enough. The last litter of kittens was too much for her and she succumbed to the virus.
I plan to have the four spring kittens neutered this weekend. She didn't bring them to me until they were about six weeks old and three of the four are friendly, one is still wild. Hopefully they will come through with no problems, and my other cats are old enough that they probably are safe. For the last week or so I'd suspected that the August litter had not survived. I thought she had them among the round bales of hay stored near the barn, but then I'd see her coming each morning from the woods along the driveway. She did not appear to be nursing kittens. I hunted a little in the woods for them yesterday evening, thinking I might hear little kittens mewing but found nothing. So, except for the four boys on the back porch, that is the end of mama kitty.
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