Page 5 - Spring 19

File photo
First I need to apologize that you will not see a picture of “Zenzi”, [file photo opposite] the little tricolour cat that came to my practice nine months ago. As this story continues I hope you will understand why that is.
Zenzi’s guardian is a human doctor and actually goes to my colleague with her dog for physiotherapy and acupuncture. As she was sitting in the waiting room we were exchanging a few words and she suddenly asked if maybe I could help her. She has this five-year old spayed female cat she loves a lot but is at the end of her patience, as the cat is peeing and spraying everything in the house, one chair in particular – and as she and her husband now want to renovate, she is afraid what might happen after that with the new furniture. I told her I would do my best to help but to be honest, the peeing cats are always a risk and in my experience difficult to treat.
So Zenzi comes a few weeks later and she is carried in a backpack, where I can’t see her face and when we open it so I can check her she hides and only comes out, when nobody is looking at her anymore. After a while she settles in her guardian’s lap and does her best to ignore me.
She was about six weeks, old when she was left at the barn, where the owner has her horses and more dead than alive with a bad case of the flu, eyes blotched and smeared with pus, sneezing and diarrhoea but all of it mild. Despite that she was more dead than alive, body temperature low, so the guardian describes the first days, she and Zenzi spent together. Everything was treated with antibiotics; she sat and slept the first four days on a warm water bottle until “life came back to her”. When she was two years old she had once again diarrhoea and that disappeared once again with antibiotics.
Zenzi is an indoor cat with access to the balcony that runs around the whole house. She used to sit at the edge but after she fell down – and the guardian can’t tell me how that happened – and was lost for three hours, she never went to sit on the edge again. Another time she slipped on the stairs. Ever since she has to be carried up and down that flight of stairs. When they forget her, she stands at the bottom or the top and cries for help. Her memory is excellent and she never forgets a bad experience. She is shy, does not come out when her guardian’s have guests. When she is stressed she sneezes.
The Story of Zenzi and her Chair
by Beatrice Milleder, Germany
continued on p4