Thanks to all who offered condolences, both on and off list. It is appreciated.
I will respond briefly here to a couple, if you'll bear with me.
To Paul, who wrote, "Now, I wake up every morning with a beautiful
platinum-grey Ragdoll named Mittens all stretched out and snuggled up to my
back."
Exactly what is it with ragdolls that they have to be in the middle of
everything we do? I am crowded in the bed each night by 33 pounds of ragdolls,
the resident circus brothers, Barnum and Bailey. I haven't been to the bathroom
alone in the nearly six years since they came to live with us. If I close the
door and shut them out, they scratch and bang on it and yell "Let us in" in
cateese. Barnum is sitting in the chair beside me as I type this. He wants to
help, and he wants the mouse. When he was a kitten, he chewed a mouse cord
completely in two.
To Greg, who wrote, "The good news in your case is that even though the
coronavirus that's involved in FIP is contagious, the disease itself really
isn't per se. Hopefully, you won't have any other cats in your household that
will develop it."
The three remaining cats are Kinsey, the ruling female, who's 14, and the
ragdoll brothers, who are six, so our vet says, because of their age, we
probably don't have anything to worry about. We got a second opinion from our
oldest daughter, who's a vet, and she agreed. We don't take our cats to her
because her clinic is way the hell and gone on the other side of Atlanta and is
35 miles and over an hour away, while the Cat Clinic of Cobb is two miles and
five minutes away. Besides, she doesn't specialize and will treat anything,
whether it walks, hops, crawls, flies, slithers, swims, or even oozes into the
clinic.
We understand that the virus can survive in the house for several months, but
is killed by common household disinfectants, so we'll do a bit of spraying and
scrubbing and wait until the fall, or later, to fill the vacancy, probably with
a Maine Coon kitten.
And one additional thought. We are pretty dry here, probably at the beginning
of another summer drought, and digging even a small 18x24x24-inch kitten-size
grave yesterday made me wonder how the folks back in the old days, before the
invention of the backhoe, managed to bury their dead in this red Georgia clay.
When dry, this stuff is about .02 of a point down the Moh scale from a brick.
Thanks again for the kind words, folks. And don't forget to take pictures of
pets, family, and friends, because it seems like we always expect them to be
with us longer than they actually are.
Walt
--
"Anything more than 500 yards from
the car just isn't photogenic." --
Edward Weston
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