My beautiful cat losing 1/3 of her tail

[ooooohnoooooo]

Hello fellow kitty-litterers

My beautiful (but quite grumpy) 15 yo girl came home at the weekend with a totally broken tail 🥲 We don't know how it happened but she in surgery now having her tail amputated as it was un-fixable.

She will have less than a third of it left.

Does anyone have any experience with tail loss / partial tail loss please? She is a hunter and likes to balance and walk on high walls and fences so I'm not sure how quickly she will adapt.

Any ideas, hints or tips for helping her to cope would be much appreciated.

My poor girl. She's so distressed and in pain. 🥲

We had a cat who had her tail removed and was fine.

As for painkillers, we're putting liquid (Metacam) into Lick-e-Lix which they love.

For tablets, if they're crushable, we've crushed them into a hit of butter and smeared it on the top of their front paws. They hate having dirty paws and lick it off.

Maybe keep your cat in overnight and it won't be able to hunt and kill animals and birds.

Tell me, how do you know the OP doesn't?

I don't, @mayorofcasterbridge . But OP said she was a hunter in her first para. Her concern should be for the wildlife her cat may kill, not for her cat 🤷🏼‍♀️

She loves her cat - she doesn't have a personal relationship with the wildlife!

The cat was distressed and in pain, and that's what you come up with?

I hate it when cats go after birds. Mine are indoors so they can't but my next door neighbour has a killer cat and I only have to appear now for him to leave my garden! I don't care about rats and mice. They're disease spreading vermin.

@dragonscannotswim your going to lose it when you find out about birds of prey and wildlife.

Glad your cats better op.

Mine lost most of her tail, has not stopped her hunting at all in anyway shape or form (she woke me up with her latest offering at 2 this morning)

Don't be daft. That's nature and birds of prey are free. House cats don't need to hunt. They kill an estimated 14 million animals and birds each year, and this could be avoided.

We have, and encourage, lots of wildlife in our garden. We have a badger, hedgehog, birds of all kinds, bees, stag beetles, mice, a ladybird hotel, and we had a toad (but I don't know where he went).

So I think we are doing ok even if the cat does bring in the occasional mouse.

That's an impressive list, @ooooohnoooooo!

Re the meds, we always wrapped our cat tightly in a towel to give him meds. That kind of helped to keep his claws away... good luck!

@dragonscannotswim Thankyou. it's down to a lot of effort -it's a tiny london garden and so many people pave over (I do wonder how many of the 'don't let your cat out' people have fake grass and paving slabs 😂).

We are now thankfully past the meds stage. Phew !!!

That's even more impressive then! 🐦

Cats don’t know they don’t need to hunt. Cats are part of nature and aren’t domesticated. A huge part of their brains devoted to detecting movement to hunt.

Even the rspb man on radio 4 had to admit actually cats aren’t a huge problem for birds, fledglings are natures all you can eat buffet everything’s snacking on them.