A week last Friday, as I related in two recent posts, I brought home the battered, bruised and now castrated stray cat I named Burnside. Burnside is having a hard time settling in and often howls to be let outside. While he will let me stroke him up to a point, if I'm not careful he can suddenly turn and bite me. It's not him, it's me. I should know better. And I need to be really really patient with him. And careful.
He's also having a bad affect on Aelfric my British shorthair. Aelfric is normally a laid back, playful affectionate cat, which he still is, but... He now feels the need to demonstrate that he is the alpha cat in the house and will confront Burnside, howling at him and sometimes attacking him, despite Burnside being larger. So far it's all show, bluff and bluster with no blood drawn.
And as if that wasn't bad enough. Emma, the black and white kitten, has turned out to be older than I thought and has proved it by going into heat. Now despite Burnside being recently neutered, he's still got male hormones circulating in his system and certainly enough to be turned on by what Emma's giving off. In turn, she is receptive to his advances and I'm often finding him mounting her.
Naturally my first instinct was to stop them but I came to realise that I can't watch them all the time. Obviously the solution is to get Emma spayed as soon as possible but I've been told that vets won't neuter cats in heat so I'm hoping that she goes off before it becomes impossible to spay her because of advanced pregnancy. I seemed to spend a lot of last year looking after kittens and I'd really rather not do it again. Mainly because I'm sick of having my house wrecked by the little monsters.
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