Pet Chat Team, which of course comprises of, but not limited to, Cheryl Shaw. G'day, Cheryl. Hello there, Mark. And Dr. Kimberley Earle, ready to take those veterinarian-type questions today. Absolutely. Hit me with them. All right, but first, as always, we're on Broach Watch with Cheryl. Okay, what do you think, Mark? It's a galloping dog. Oh, but look what's on it. Bubbles. Bubbles. Oh, I know what that means. You can stay sticking close to home territory today. Oh, yeah. We're just following on from last week. So last week we were talking about, you know, bathing dogs and how frequently you should do that. But today we're going to step through the correct process because a lot of people don't get bathing right.
All right, so you just run a hose over for a couple of minutes and then you... No, no, no, no. Let's do it right. We will do it right today. Cheryl Shaw is here, as is Kimberly Earl. And Jan from Spears Point, you're with us at the moment. You had to return a ragdoll kitten, Jan. Say it isn't so. It was a cat. A cat, yeah. A animal cat. Okay, so tell us a little bit about it. So you got the cat. I brought the cat off a breather and she's a 34-year-old. Okay. And I got her to get me the same kitty that they use and the feed by the feed and she changed her over to the feed that I've run. And, yeah, so she got everything for me. So six weeks. And in June, that six weeks, there's no way she...
It went from my bedroom up the hall last week and would only come out after it was around. If anyone knew it, she would dart back under there and stay there. I was wondering what I've done wrong because I couldn't catch her and I can't get around well, so I couldn't bend over to try and drag her out. I kept her for six weeks. Right, and you don't have any other dogs or cats in the house? It was only me, but I've got a cleaner that comes in.
So, I mean, ragdolls are, they can be cats that are prone to some anxiety issues. And unfortunately, a cat in that situation where she's already a mature age cat, she's lived in the same home for, you know, all the time. Sometimes they're not. But she was with the breeder for that whole time, right? So she hasn't. No, the breeder was the second home. I don't know what age, but she must be mature age.
So, I mean, it to me sounds like she wasn't socialized very well as a young kitten, that she hadn't learned necessarily to cope with new and novel situations in her life. And then the other thing is that when you've brought her home, she's potentially, that the new location is potentially overwhelming for her. So we often do talk about bringing a new cat into an environment where we just bring them into a nice small enclosed space where they can obviously have a place to hide, but have easy access to food and water and a litter box in a nice enclosed space. We would often encourage using something like a pheromone diffuser so that you've got some good. I went to the vet. I got a spray.
But the thing is, the breeder did tell me, in all honesty, to keep her in a small and closed space. But it wasn't feasible to shut the door on the bedroom. It would have been too small. Yeah, well, I mean, it's only for a temporary sort of situation. So like a small bedroom or a small bathroom is actually perfect because the cat needs to learn and feel secure in a small area before they start to be brave enough to explore the wider environment. And so probably what's happened is she's just been overwhelmed. She doesn't have a good map in her head of where the areas are that are safe. So she's just found she's fixated on that coffee table going underneath the coffee table because they like to go into a nice sort of enclosed sort of space where she can watch the world. So she can probably turn around and watch the feet going past from all different angles. She's in the corner, a coffee table in the corner. So nothing can sneak up behind her. It's only a very small dwelling.
doing it. So it wasn't the run of the whole house. So I mean, I would say in this situation, it's probably a combination of the fact that it's the wrong cat for your situation, because I don't think that that cat, who obviously was an anxious cat, probably hasn't been socialized very well as a kitten, particularly if she's been used as a breeder. That is unfortunately quite common. And then we've probably let her have a little bit too much space, which has sort of been a bit overwhelming for her. Now, if you had given her...
eight weeks, 12 weeks, six months, she may have come out of her shell, but obviously that's pretty tricky for you and it's not necessarily a great way of life for her either. So, you know, I guess some suggestions would be to potentially try, A, maybe not a ragdoll because they can be quite sensitive, you know, sort of cats, potentially a kitten, although there's some downsides to kittens as well. No, I want to mature cats. I don't want to start off with a kitten. I tried to get a rescue cat and it's not as easy as they say. I tried to borrow them and missed out. Right, okay.
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, if you look at the RSPCA, things like that, they've got quite a few rescue cats there. But you're really going to want to look for a cat who's an outgoing personality, you know, who will come up to you, you know, move towards you rather than sort of go away and hide in that sort of situation. And then, you know, just sometimes have another try. Use the Feliway spray, the Fairmont diffuser. If you can, you know, for the first five to seven days, a nice small enclosed room. Even if it's just a small bedroom, that's okay. The cat will just, you know, learn the lay of the land in that room. As long as it's big enough for a litter tray and some food and water and a cat scratching post or a hiding hole, something like that, so the cat can feel really comfortable and really get familiar with that place. It's not forever. It's just to give them a sense of...
security in that small space and then allow them to venture out on their own terms. That's likely to be anxiety. I put another kitty litter down beside where she was going. Anyway, would that cat eventually become good, do you think? I sort of feel like I've given up too easy. Hard to say. May not. It's hard to say. No worries, Jen. To any RFM 103.7 as we continue with Pet Chat. Ladies, it looks like we might be kitty cat fever today. Cat day. Every day is cat day. Every day is a good day when every day is cat day, I reckon. Mark loves these cats. G'day, Marjorie at Mayfield. You have a fussy eater at your house today. Yes.
So tell us what's happened, Marjorie. Okay, she's just turned one and at Christmas time she was given a few prawns and now she's got that way she refuses to eat. Oh dear, she's a cat with high class teeth. It's like on those ads for cat food, you know. When you say she refuses to eat anything but prawns, what are we offering her that's not prawns? Well, I bought the, you know, you buy the strips of...
meat, like a cat and those sort of things. She'll have a lick and maybe a bite and then turn it to go away and won't touch it again. I've tried the pouches of cat food. She will have a lick of the ones in jelly, same thing. She has a lick and maybe a bite and won't touch it again. She has started to have a couple of pieces of dry cat food. She only eats about two or three. She will eat that you can get dry treats with filling in them. She will eat them.
And that's it. And so you're still giving her prawns every day then? Yeah, she has them about four times a day. Four times a day, okay. If you were to not give her the prawns, how long have you tried to not give her the prawns for, I guess? She's obviously developed a taste for the prawns, okay? It's actually not a very good diet for her. You're not helping her out here. You're not giving her a very balanced diet. So you actually just need to stop. And you're probably going to need to let her get a little bit hungry. If she's a young, well cat, she's highly unlikely to starve herself to death, okay? So there's an old adage that says you can't starve a dog to death.
You can starve a cat to death in some cases. Sometimes cats will just go, no, I'm not going to eat what you have on offer. But it's highly unlikely in a really young cat where you are, you know, you stop where you put lots of things out for her and you might need to give her a little kitty smorgasbord. So she's got choice. Cats like to have choice. They're not like dogs that will just eat whatever's in front of them. So but really, you just kind of just need to stop or at least you need to cut down and wean her off of it because it's not a good diet for her. You're not actually doing her any favors.
we do know that cats do often have a preference for fish and fishy based foods and that that can sometimes turn them off of foods that are chicken or other meat based. And so you've probably, you know, not helped yourself out that way a little bit, but I would do that. I would, I would each day, let's cut her down to one prawn a day and put out a small smorgasbord of different foods. Now, when I say small, I mean a teaspoon of two or three different foods and a little bit of dry food and just like be a little bit. tough on her okay you're just going to have to let her get a little bit hungry before you give up on her she's a nice young cat so it's highly unlikely i would never recommend doing this for an older cat like a geriatric cat We would try to find different ways around it. But for a nice young cat who's become a fussy eater because we've fed her something, you know, that obviously is very tasty but isn't very healthy, I think we can probably afford to be a little bit tough on her. I don't want to see her losing significant amounts of weight, though. And if she's gone for more than three days without eating properly, you know, if she really hasn't eaten anything except her allotment of one prawn a day for three days, then you may need to take her up to your local vet and just get them to check her out and make sure there isn't something else going on. She's not having any troubles with vomiting or anything like that? No. I did try cutting up prawns.
a couple of prawns, very small, and mix it up with a teaspoon of, you know, like the meat. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you've probably created a little bit of a prawn addict. You may have to go cold turkey on her, like quitting smoking. But I would start with first, you know, cutting her down and being a bit tough on her, cutting her down to one prawn a day. I wouldn't mix the prawn in because then she's going to keep looking for the prawn. So I would, you know, feed her the prawn separately. And then here you go, sweetheart. This is what else you have available, you know, sort of for you. But just keep an eye that make sure she isn't losing weight and that she isn't actually starving herself. It can take a little bit of time. Once you see that she is eating other things and you said she's eating a bit of biscuits, that's fine. Then just stop. We're trying to get her off of the prawn, you know, relatively quickly. Yeah. Okay.
Okay, then. Good luck, Marjorie. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, all the best with that, Marjorie. G'day, Helen at Raymond Terrace. You have a rescue kitten that's suckling on her neck, and now you want to get her to try and stop there, Helen. Yes, please. Hi, Helen. How old is the kitten now? She's six months old now. I've got two at Christmas time. Both absolutely beautiful, loving kittens, and they love each other. They bonded well. Just what I need is assistance cats, shall we say. But to me, it would seem that she must have been taken from her mother too soon. They were three months old when I got them, and they come from...
a rescue home in Sydney. So I've gone from Rutherford at RSPCA. I mean, that's what makes sense to me. And when I talk to others, I think the same thing, that she must have been taken off a mother too soon. And there's lots of reasons that rescue kittens end up being bottle fed and actually suckling and like persistent suckling and other oral stimulations or oral...
almost obsessions, is actually a known thing in kittens who have been hand-reared, bottle-reared. It's actually a really common thing. It can be quite difficult to get her to stop completely. A lot of them will start sucking on blankets, pieces of fabric, corners of pillows, that sort of thing. But you certainly don't want her doing it on your neck, obviously. She's looking at that as a soothing, you know, sort of thing. So I would try to redirect her if you can, you know, somewhere else. When she's doing it sort of to you, we want to sort of try to redirect her into a bed or a play area or maybe onto a nice comfy spot high up on a cat scratching post or cat perch that she likes, that she feels comfortable with, because it's basically a self-soothing sort of behavior that she's doing, right? She's getting a lot of, you know, probably endorphins and an oxytocin release from doing that behavior. It's making her feel comfortable about things. She's getting on with the other kitten, you said? They've bonded well? Oh, yes, they bonded instantly. And does she suckle the other kitten?
No, they wash each other. So she doesn't do anything else except me. And if I redirect her, like I'll just gently move her because I have a bad back. So I sit a fair bit and jump. So I will just move her somewhere else. But the thing is, or I'll put something around my neck. The thing is, she will then chew on me somewhere else. And it tends to be something, a skin lesion or a mole or something like that. So she will come and sit next to me now. And then she just sits there and looks at me. And then one little poor will come out inside the lounge. She says she can if she comes, if she's going to get there, because I do like the stop, you know, she goes, oh, okay.
but it's just not going away. She's still, if I don't have anything around my neck, and especially if I'm having a nanny nap, you know, I can hear her coming. She's got a huge purr, and she just comes, and she wants to sit on my chest the whole time, which is, I have an esophageal spasm, so it's not ideal to put me in pain. No, yeah, that's right, yeah. So I definitely redirect her. She's not chewing on, well, other than normal chewing stuff, but she's not sucking on anything else except me.
Yeah. So, I mean, she's obviously fixating a little bit on you. I'd imagine like a mother figure, I would imagine she's getting a lot of comfort from that. It's going to be tricky. I suspect maybe looking at, again, some pheromone therapy for her, you know, spraying a little comfy blanket or a little pillow, giving her a little bed area that you can spray regularly or have a diffuser going on in the house somewhere close to where that is that you can try to sort of redirect. And it's probably just going to be persistence, you know, in terms of like, you know, as she goes to do it before she even gets into it, if you can, you know, just.
not push her away, but sort of, you know, redirect or push her away, put something there like you're doing, put something around your neck or a blanket or something like that so she doesn't have access, you know, sort of to it. Or you might need to pick her up and, you know, bodily move her, you know, onto a bed, you know, away from you. Because I guess what we want to teach her is that you're happy to interact with her if she's interacting in an appropriate way. But if she's going to start suckling on you, you're going to be like, nah. If it was a mother cat, the mother cat would start to get rough with her, right? And say, nah, you're not going to do that. So we don't recommend necessarily that. But, you know, giving her a little like, you know.
pat with your finger and just sort of like move away. Like, go away. I'm not going to interact with you if that's how you're going to behave is good. And then when she's doing the right thing, when she's sitting kindly in your lap and just calm, you know, patting her lots and things like that, that's what we want to reinforce. But as she starts to get into the licky sucky business, we're just going to be like, no, off you go. You know, go play on your own. That's not what we want to do. As I say, she does this sit there. She knows she looks and I can either do the hand or she gets to look and she goes, okay, I'll go somewhere else.
I think you're doing all the right things. I think you just need to be persistent. I was just trying to make her too, well, I'm not offended, but, you know, that she would go, because she does tend to think she'll go and sit on the floor where the other one will be sitting in my lap or between my legs, you know. That's okay. She'll work it out. She'll work it out. So we are right that it's usually that they've, it's that suckling that they've missed out on, they've been separated too. Yeah, quite often. But they're the most beautiful, loving kittens, you know. So, you know, it's just what I wanted. I had one prior to that, and she was the total opposite, and unfortunately I had to put her down. She got cancer when she was, well, she wasn't even two years old. That's unfortunate.
All right. I've got these two beautiful, loving kittens. Thank you very much for that. I was just clarifying that I am doing the right thing. Yeah, sounds good. All right, best of luck with it, Helen. Now, Cheryl, we haven't had any dogs yet. We haven't. It's a cat morning. Maybe there'll be afternoon. Oh, it's afternoon. Of course. And look, we'll see if we can get to the washing, the dog, and maybe a dog of the week. So I might even get you to read that, Cheryl, later on. Oh, that's your role, Mark. Give me a break. Yeah, to any RFM 103.7. We're just hanging and banging with the Pet Chat team today. It's Cheryl Shaw and Dr. Kimberley, because we haven't had the dog topic for you yet, Cheryl. So it looks like you might be saving that up until next week at this stage. Sounds like a plan. We've got another story about a cat. What's going on?
Some of the lights disappeared for us. But look, a new rescue kitten. But one of the older cats is now hissing at everything and everything, and all the older cats appear frightened of the kitten. Take us through that, ladies. Yeah, so adding a new kitten into a household of mature-age cats is challenging and doesn't always go that well for the older cats. So we know that cats are – they have a tendency to be a little bit passive-aggressive sometimes. Sometimes they're overtly aggressive, but they are very set in their ways. And we do find it can be really challenging to add a new kitten to a settled, stable cat home. A lot of times the kittens will settle in. The kittens are quite adaptable, and they're quite often looking for companionship.
The older cats are often not willing to take that new kitten sort of into the fold as such. And we know that a lot of cats actually already live in multi-cat households where they don't actually get on very well with their other cats. Now, the owners may not actually see anything overt, but we talk about cats forming cat families. And you can't actually say that your cats like each other, even if they don't overtly fight. If they're not grooming each other, so we call that allo-grooming, where they're grooming each other back and forth and they're not just sleeping together, but grooming. They haven't formed a cat family if they're not doing that mutual grooming of each other. So they might sleep on the same bed, they might sleep on the same pillow.
But if you have cats that don't groom each other, they consider themselves acquaintances and they're often not family or they're not even very friendly with each other. So what we have is a situation where we've got at least one or maybe two or more settled older cats. Mandy has brought a new kitten into the fold. Now those cats, depending on how long it's been, those cats might learn to accept the new kitten. But what we may find is that it's really, really stressful sometimes for those older cats. And bringing a new cat or kitten into the house often will cause a lot of anxiety-related problems. We can sometimes get over-grooming. We can get urinary tract problems where the older cats start to have urine that's got blood in it. They might stop.
using their litter trays normally we need to make sure that we have a litter box for every cat plus one or at least every cat family so if Mandy has two existing cats and they're groomers they will groom each other they're happy and bonded to each other and they've got the new cat she needs at least three litter boxes because she's got at least two cat families but probably better would be four litter boxes so one for each cat plus a spare because they don't like to share litter boxes with cats that aren't in their same cat family Amazing how the stress just goes all the way back up the line. It totally, yeah, it totally does. So sometimes the older cats will adjust, sometimes they won't. But the same rules apply for what we spoke with the caller earlier about you want to give everybody in the house, so that new kitten really needs to be into a fairly small enclosed space, so a single room with its own food and water, litter tray, cat scratching posts, things like that. And that's going to allow that kitten to acclimatise to that area, but it's also going to allow the other cats in the house to acclimatise to the new smells and sounds of the new kitten in the house before we just start letting them interact. And interactions with new cats, new kittens should always be supervised pretty closely, and I wouldn't say that they should be allowed to interact without supervision.
So it's not really the right thing to do to leave everybody just free in the house and head off to work because occasionally we'll see quite bad injuries where an older cat has swiped at a younger kitten and we've got a claw to the eye or a bite or that sort of thing. So it's not always straightforward and doesn't always work out. Lots of times it does, but it's not uncommon for it to take six to 12 months. Yeah, definitely the sort of thing we want to avoid. All right, best of luck with all of that, Mandy.
Good times, great music, and pet chat at 2NURFM 103.7. Dr. Kimberley Earless here, as is Cheryl Shaw. Cheryl, I know you wanted to get to dog grooming today. Again, that really is your backyard, but unfortunately, you can put that topic away for it until next time. Sounds like a plan. Which I know means you don't have to think about one for next week, so it's a bit of a winner for everybody. G'day, Jason and Mary Lynn. We finally got a dog question today. What's going on with your four-year-old female staffie there, Jase? It's all growls, barking, and she'll even attack. She'll be fine with it. But the female dogs, no, does not like. When I picked this girl up, she was three and a half years of age, and the original owner bought sisters.
After three years, they started clashing. And the one that I've taken now is the aggressive one that was attacking the other system. And it just seems to be any female dogs. Is she desexed or is she still an entire female? She's an entire female. She's currently on heat at the moment. And do you find it gets worse when she's on heat and her hormones are raging a bit? Yeah, if anything, she's more sookie. But what about with the other dogs? Because that's not uncommon for a female entire, you know, to get a little bit more aggressive, I guess, when their hormones are sort of ramping up during that heat cycle. Okay. Well, my daughter's got a female too.
No, she doesn't like that one either. Yeah. I mean, I guess I would, there's lots of different sort of ways to go about it. I mean, aggression in dogs is a hard thing to address in a really short period of time. But to be honest, the first place I would start would be to probably de-sex her and take that out of there. And then, you know, when you have a situation where she has learned to fight or be aggressive with, you know, whatever happened with the other dogs, they've obviously, you know, started to not get on. And that sometimes becomes a behavior habit that she's now carrying into other situations. So it takes a little bit of work to try to, you know, get down, nut out what's happening, you know, sort of there.
But we probably need to start with taking the hormones out of the situation. Has she ever had a litter of pups that you're aware of? No, she hasn't. Okay, good. So that's fine.
So, yeah, I mean, I would say start with that. Wait till her heat is finished if you can. And then look at getting her de-sex. And you probably need to start, you know, she's still a fairly young dog, but she's had four years to sort of develop this habit. So, you know, the things to do are A, to be aware of it so that we're not letting her in an uncontrolled situation where she can get into any trouble with another dog. And then we want to try to start creating a positive association between other female dogs. So it's perfect. If you've got a daughter who's got another dog, we want to get the two dogs together in neutral territory, not in your house, not in her house, somewhere sort of neutral, everybody on a leash and not too close because we don't want your dog to be too.
worked up but we want your dog to be seeing that the other dog is sort of nearby and when she's nearby and your dog is calm she gets to have some nice treats and then we keep giving her treats while your daughter is slowly moving your her dog her female dog closer but we have to stop when your dog starts to get more focused on the dog than she is on the treats right so the idea is to start slowly slowly making a positive association between that dog and treats and over time this is not an afternoon's you know activity this is a you know three times a week for three to six weeks maybe activity that we start to um hopefully get to the point where those two dogs can you know be sitting side by side and be um calm around each other and be tolerating each other and hopefully they will learn to um enjoy each other's company and then we start to work on like the next dog and hopefully through association of okay this is a female dog She's an entire dog. She's not a threat to me. And actually, there's really good things that happen when she's around. And we're going to try to now transfer that into the next dog or another dog or dogs in general. But a lot of times it has to do with keeping, you know, keeping them calm in all situations with them and just really being careful that it's under it.
under controlled circumstances because staffies have big strong jaws and when things they have a tendency to get very excited and she's already developed that habit of you know attacking rather than being calm so it takes a bit of work where all else fails not even where all else fails it's not a bad idea to talk to your local vet about whether or not they feel that she would be suitable for some pharmaceutical assistance Prozac can be a really great drug in some of these dogs not that she necessarily needs to be on it for her whole entire life but it can help her to relearn some of the bad habits and to be more calm in her environment so when you're talking to them about desexing have a chat with them about that as well best of luck with everything Jason and Cheryl that topic now you can put it away for next week. So the smile is ear to ear and around the back of the hair. So thanks, Cheryl Shaw. Appreciate it. Didn't have much for you today. No, no. But to be here next week, Kimberley Gold, we basically loaded you up with mostly cat questions. That's all right. That's kind of cool. I like cats. All right, pet show back again next week at the same time. Thanks for listening to this podcast from 2NURFM at the University of Newcastle. You'll find them all at 2NURFM.com.