The Sprayberries

Our 3 Legged Cat

[Ty] 20 Aug '07

You may be saying to yourself "but you guys don't have a 3 legged cat." And up until Sat you would have been correct. No longer. This weekend our cat Tokugawa had his front right leg amputated.

It all began innocently enough Saturday morning when I saw Toku heading into the house and I stooped down to give him some love. As a trained biologist I quickly noticed that not only could I see his skull through the hole on his head but his front leg was dragging behind him in the dirt. Needless to say we were loaded into the car and headed for the vet in under 5 minutes.

Now I have seen more than my share of animal viscera and have personally skinned and stuffed a number of mammals. His wounds were clearly at least couple of hours old and possibly as many as 12 in addition to being the worst wounds I have ever seen on a still breathing animal. Now keep in mind that I found him trying to get into our backyard slider. We have a 5 foot fence that the cats have all learned to climb. Somehow he hauled his seriously busted ass home from wherever he got hurt and scaled our fence with only 3 legs. Instead of using the front door. Damn cat.

The vet was of the opinion that he had been mangled by a fan belt and I was inclined to agree with her that something mechanical got a fast unexpected hold of him. The wounds all had pretty clean edges and if a coyote had done that to him Toku certainly wouldn't have been able to escape.

At any rate she gave him a very positive prognosis for surgery and we decided to proceed with the insanely expensive operation, the alternative being putting our otherwise perfectly healthy three year old cat down.

Jordanna picked him up from the vet today and he's been drunkenly stumping after her all evening allowing himself to collapse at her feet in a furry medicated pile whenever she holds still for more than a few minutes.

Below are a few pictures of him today for the strong of constitution.