If you haven’t already, I would love to hear about the cat you treated that kept attacking its own tail?

drferox:

That cat was certainly an oddball, and I don’t know what went wrong in hi head or with his nerves or both, but he hated his own tail.

He was an indoor cat, so when he presented for a cat bite abscess on his tail it was a bit suspicious, but he did live with another feline friend so it wasn’t impossible, even though the owner had never seen them fight.

So we treated the abscess. And that was fine.

But then he got another abscess on his tail.

This was a bit suspicious, so he was admitted to treat it surgically. He was placed in a hospital cage while he was waiting his turn.

There is something unique about the sounds of a cat fight, and when that cacophony of noise erupted from the kennel room, we all rushed in to see how the hell two cats had got access to each other.

Instead, we found this cat, on his own, backed into a corner of the cage throwing an evil look at his own tail, which was twitching in irritation as cats’ tails tend to do.

We watched as he growled, hissed, spat and then launched at his own tail, and screamed after he’d bitten himself again.

The cat was giving himself cat bite abscesses from repeatedly attacking his own tail.

In the end, we couldn’t curb this behavior even with medication, it was like he didn’t recognise the tail as his own, and he ended up having it amputated for welfare reasons. With only a stump of a tail remaining (too short to flick in his peripheral vision), he went on to live a normal life.

I don’t know if the cat had altered neurological sensation in his tail, or some sort of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, but he is one of the most unusual cases I’d ever seen.