Saving Money on Veterinary Expenses

Don't ya love the title, a cat owner, as if you could really "own" any cat, and not the other way around. I have been doing my share of kitten care, who have "come of age" so to speak and get different ailments. Some of them start out on the wrong foot and in spite of that make it. Gizmo is one such little girl, who was born in a bad situation and abandoned by momma cat. You can see her picture at the end of this article.

Anyway, here are some of the situations you might see if you are a multiple cat owner or rescuer:

Cats, Cats, and More Cats

This is one of those things that happens, whether you like it to or not. You see when you are a cat owner, you really are adopted by the cat and not the other way around. Ask anyone who has a cat if this is true.

Another aspect of cat care, is the "coming home pregnant the day before the vet appointment." They just seem to know. They have a sixth sense with their nine lives. So in this way you increase the number of cats in the household. If you do not get the necessary surgery done soon enough, you will become overrun by the prodigy of the few you started with. On the good side, you can make Farmvilles for them all.

Crusty Ears and Ear Mites

Usually about the time a cat is about four or five pounds, there will be a few problems which will inevitably come up. That is the time I have noticed the most problems with ear mites, worms, etc.

I found my littlest one, this morning, with crusty ears, and she didn't have them the night before. She must have picked up the ear mites somewhere. She is probably spreading them to the other cats in the house. Yay!

Well, I cleaned them with olive oil, wiped them out, not reaching way in, just the canal. I wiped them the best I could, and then I dried that off of the ear canal. Never insert anything way down into the ear canal. We are just wiping the walls of the ear canal off with this cleaning technique. You can see videos on youtube.com on how to clean cat's ears.

If I had had vitamin E, I would have used equal amounts of it with the olive oil. Since I didn't have the vitamin E, I just used the olive oil to clean the ear with. Olive oil is very soothing. This method is discussed on earthclinic.com.

After that, I took one of my syringes, I get from the farm supply stores, the really small ones, which hold only 1 ml and are very thin. These I will put peroxide in and clean the ear with that. You can dilute the peroxide with water. In a really bad case, I won't dilute the peroxide. This was a very bad case.

I take the needles out of the syringes and throw them away in the cover they come with. I use the little syringes because they can't see you coming at them with them hidden mostly by your palm. I never stick it far into the ear just a little and softly squirt the diluted peroxide into the ear canal and wait for them to shake their head. This also cleaned the skin in the ear canal working very nicely.

You can find additional information on cleaning a cat's ears with peroxide or alcohol on the internet. Some people even seem to have success using hand sanitizer, but not if there are open wounds. I found this information at earthclinic.com.

After I saw the ear was as clean as I could get it without going deeply into the ear, I dried it off with tissue paper. Then I put the amount of pyrethrin drops in there as written on the bottle. You can get those at amazon.com. There are many different kinds of them. I haven't noticed an allergic reaction with her so I will keep using the drops.

Fleas and Tapeworms

You are never going to get away from fleas, because they are outside. There are things you can do to make the cat less attractive, but my favorite way to deal with them is to buy an Advantage Refill Kit at first and then just the Advantage refill later.

What it is, is a large size Advantage tube, a syringe without a needle, and a topical application chart by weight in cats. The actual kit has the amber bottle you pour all the Advantage into, and then take out what you need in the syringe.

Once you have the amber bottle you can just buy the refill without the amber bottle cheaper. It comes with a syringe that is 1 ml in volume. It is really easy to dose all the cats with what they need. I also buy one of these when my large dog who is over fifty pounds and needs Advantage, too, because it is the same price and I get the syringe and the dosage chart for free. You can order the starter kit online. If you have lots of cats this saves you tons of money. So these are the ways to deal with fleas.

Now comes the tapeworms, from the fleas. All kittens have them. What do I hear? A goat at our house? No, I wish we had a goat, but we only have the Goat Safeguard dewormer you can buy at the pet supply store. I buy mine at the feed store or off of amazon.com. I love amazon.com as you can tell by now.

What I buy is 100 mg per ml. I use a tuberculin syringe, it has a total of 1 ml in it. You will be dealing with small dosages with kittens. This is NOT a teaspoon. A teaspoon is 5 ml. We are dealing with 1 ml and below.

The dosage I use is the following:

.25 ml for a ten pound cat
.12 ml for a five pound cat
.6 ml for a 2.5 pound cat

I don't worm cats under this poundage because they are really too young in my experience.

It is so much easier, especially with grown cats to take them to the vet's and get them pilled and then the vet is the bad guy. I have one cat I will not do the worming on or any medication on unless it is amoxicillin. He is just too wild. I had him at the vet today for his rabies shot and then he took a droncit pill. The vet used a pill pusher, a stick like thing that keeps you from getting your hands bitten by the cat. I could have done the goat Safeguard which is the same thing, but I didn't want the cat to see me as the bad guy. I am trying to change some perspective with him and I need him to have rapport with me. So the total cost of the visit was about 30. 15 dollars for the rabies shot and 15 dollars for the droncit pill.
The Goat safeguard, which is 100 mg per ml is more expensive at first, but is saves money in the long run and is the same thing.

Next comes the time when a kitten gets stressed and scratched or scratched and infected. I always have amoxicillin on hand. I save any I get and then if I need it I order fish mox or other antibiotic for fish from DrsFostersmith.com.

The dosage for cats is as follows:

The size of the dose depends on the weight of the cat and the severity of the infection. It can be administered in doses ranging from 6.6 to 20 milligrams of amoxicillin per 2.2 pounds of body weight. That means a 10 pound cat will receive 30 milligrams of medicine two to three times a day, according to the veterinarian's directives.

In order to dose a cat you need to know his weight and the amount of mg per teaspoon. I have some amox left that is 400 per tsp. Here is how I figure their dosages based on their weight and the amount of mg in the bottle. It is a little weird, but I am not a math genius.

"Gizmo" is about 4 pounds so her dosage would be, for a serious infection, 20 mg per 2 pounds of body weight. She is four pounds so she would get 40 mg. She needs a little less than 1/2 of a 1/4 tsp of amox right now if it is 400 mg per teaspoon, and a teaspoon is 5 ml, not to confuse the issue.

The amox is in 400 mg per teaspoon so here is the breakdown. We are looking for the magic dose of 40 mg.

400 mg 1 tsp
200 mg 1/2 tsp
100 mg 1/4 tsp
50 mg 1/8 tsp = 1/2 of 1/4 tsp
25 mg 1/16th tsp 1/2 of the above amount or 1/2 of 1/8 teaspoon

Sometimes we will take in emergency cases and treat them here and then find homes for them later on. I love taking them to the vet's, but I also love using the same meds at home when they are the exact same thing. We are about at our limit right now, with five cats. But at least they are all healthy. :) I learned a lot from my wildlife rehab friends, who work with many animals and have to find ways to save the animals suffering, and there are a large number of them, making individual vet trips impossible, except for special cases.

I hope this little essay has been helpful to you. It has helped many cats that have come through here to survive, in fact, even to thrive. If you see any problems with my dosages please let me know. Perfection is a work in progress! Blessings.