Cat of the Month -January 2024 – Tigger

COTM – Jan 2024
Better late than never, we can now announce the winner of the first Cat of the Month for 2024; and it is the gorgeous ginger boy

Tigger!
Vet2Cat has been looking after timid little Tigger since the Year of the Pandemic in 2020 when getting any pet to any vet became the stuff of legend, and it was particularly difficult for Tigger’s hooman. Vet2Cat continued to do house visits with all the social distancing and masks to boot, and this suited Tigger and mum down to the ground.
As he is rather a flight risk, Tigger is secured in his carrier before our arrival, and we take him upstairs to the bathroom to ensure he can’t leg it and hide somewhere! He copes really well just sitting in the bottom half of his carrier, with a blanket placed over him so he feels secure, and we gently work our way around his furry body to give him his examination, all the while distracting him with Lickelix, nom nom.
Through our preventative health screening, including testing his urine samples we have discovered his pee is not as strong as it ought to be. Cats evolved from a desert habitat, and so evolved a way to conserve water by super-concentrating their urine. Even in cold and rainy Britain, this evolutionary trait prevails, so when cats’ wee starts to get below a certain level of concentration (measured as ‘Specific Gravity’ – also used in brewing wine and beer!) little red warning triangles appear in vet Claire’s brain.
So far, his blood work is A-OK, and he doesn’t appear unwell at all, but we have recommended a special diet for early renal disease and will be monitoring him closely. This goes to show that blood tests are not always the ‘be all and end all’ of testing, as the kidney parameters we look at in the blood stream will only be abnormal once over two-thirds of the functioning kidney tissue is already lost. Getting a urine sample is critical to fully assess the kidneys’ working ability.
Just as well Tigger doesn’t mind peeing in a tray with the special plastic cat litter – some thing which some cats just will not abide!