2 Dogs + Elk Carcass = Story of the Month

Anne V:

I am in New Mexico, but there are elk in both arizona and nevada, yes. There are elk all over the damn place.

They don't look out very often. If you stand the ribcage on end they scramble to the top and look out, all red. Otherwise, you kinda have to get in there a little bit yourself to really see them. So I think there will not be pictures.

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CoseyMo:

"all red." I'm not sure the deeper horror of all this was fully borne in upon me till I saw that little phrase.

I'm posting earlier than usual this morning, because we've had an unusual night. Last night, our cat Zoey started getting extremely agitated and kept going to the litter box but couldn't complete the transaction, if you will. At 3:00 AM, K ended up taking the cat to our local emergency hospital, where poor Zoey underwent emergency surgery for a urinary blockage.

And since the emergency hospital closes its doors at 8:00 AM, I was up at 7:00 and heading off to pick up our catheterized kitty. Then off to the animal hospital, where Zoey will be for the next couple of days to make sure all is well.

And another thing we learned last night - what we thought was a female cat turns out to be a castrated male. So now we're the proud owners of a catheterized, gender-confused cat who gets to live it up for 2 more days at the animal hospital. The things we do for our pets.

Welp, our cat got released from the animal hospital today, and K and I (and our dog) are all damned happy to have him or her home (we refer to Zoey as 'her' half the time and 'him' the other half). Here's how things stand in the world of Zoey the cat and the people she lets live in Casa Zoey:

Zoey now sports a shaved front left leg, with a bandage that she's been trying to chew off ever since her arrival at home. The leg looks suspiciously like that of a French Poodle (or Freedom Poodle, if you must), and K noticed that the color of her skin under the fur matches our living room couch perfectly.

Her butt has been shaved as well, which I didn't even notice until after a couple of hours. The sight of naked kitty butt is shocking to say the least.

The nice veterinarian supplied us with 10 cans of cat food that is supposed to balance the acid/alkaline of her urine, which was the reason this whole saga took place. The dog has decided that the ph-balacing cat food is just about the yummiest thing she's ever tasted.

And Zoey, in an effort to keep her from gnawing off the bandage on her shaved leg, or biting the stitches out from around her penis (okay, I'm dizzy now), is now wearing a clear plastic collar that makes her look like a sattelite dish with a cat head stuck in the middle of it.

To top it all off, she's got a couple of weeks' supply of antibiotics and pain-killers which we spent the better part of a half-hour trying to get her to swallow, until we realized that we could wrap them in blobs of the ph-balacing kitty food and she'd eat them without a problem. I'd never experienced the joys of feeding pills to cats before today. Now I can die happy.

As a result of the drugs, she's wandering around the house with a glazed look in her eyes, bumping into furniture and us with the edges of her kitty sattelite dish headpiece. K and I spend our time stifling our laughter, because everybody knows that you really **** up a cat's self-esteem if they catch you laughing at them.

So let me just thank everyone who sent emails and posted comments wishing Zoey well. She's doing fine, for a drugged-up, partially-shaved, plastic collar-wearing cat. And we still love her more than we can possibly put into words. It's good to have that little furball back home with us.