Jack’s story – a collar safety lesson

My name is Becky and I live with my partner Rob; we currently have 7 cats, all rescues. This is the story of how Jack came to stay….
One evening in May 2018, we were settled watching the box with our three cats Bubba, Logan & Hendrix. I noticed a little black & white face appear at the patio door so went to investigate.
The cat promptly vanished under the garden gate but not before I’d noticed something unusual about his shoulder area. He had been eating the hedgehog food we’d left out.

Next night he appears again, this time before hedgehog food was put out so I got him a dish of Felix to see if I could get a closer look. My lot were curious but not overly bothered. He was definitely hungry and let me get close enough to look at him properly, after some coaxing with the food dish. Turns out he was an intact tom, rather on the slim side and with a raw gash around his armpit area. He wolfed down the food then scarpered. So the next day I asked as many neighbours as possible if they knew anything about him, but nothing doing. No reports of any missing mogs like him either. Rob wanted to name him Stumpy, on account of his incredibly short legs, but that seemed rather unfair on the poor lad! The name Jack seemed to suit him, so that’s what we stuck with.

On this basis I decided he needed help so made friends with him and he was coming into the house in just a few days. My mogs were oddly OK about this, and he bonded well almost straight away with one of our twin ginger & white boys Logan, who is a sweetie anyway and would never entertain the idea of picking a fight. Then we took him to the vet, where we were told it was a nasty collar injury, which is apparently fairly common. There was a lot of procrastination then with deciding whether or not he might lose his front right foreleg. We were just lucky the wound wasn’t infected. Naturally he wasn’t microchipped either. Estimated age at the time was about 4 years old, so someone somewhere must have known something….my suspicion will always be that whoever the real owner was had basically abandoned him because of the injury knowing it would cost substantial £££ to sort.

So we adopted him, got him neutered & chipped and then started the ball rolling to try and heal him. In a nutshell it took two attempts at the local vet at stitching him and hoping that confinement for at least 2 weeks would start to solve the problem. Both times failed because the stitches wouldn’t hold – it was an incredibly difficult injury, quite large right under the armpit where the skin doesn’t breathe well anyway to aid healing, and also for the amount of movement required for that area. He was miserable & stressed, being cooped up in a tiny pen in the vet for such a long time.

In the end we took him to a specialist vet in Hertfordshire, where (for a healthy fee) they did a fantastic job at stitching him, and kept him in for a couple of days. Upon his release he was confined to a huge dog pen in our living room which I’d got especially for him to recuperate. At least he would be in the centre of his new family and not feel isolated. Then came the problem of how to stop him mucking about with his stitches – the buster collar was all very well but totally impractical for any amount of time. I googled and found things that looked like swimming costumes for cats but none of these seemed ideal, until a colleague at work piped up about getting some baby t-shirts, at least they would cover the affected area, if you could put them on him without too much drama! I nipped into Primark & Next (difficult to know your cat’s size in baby ages) so got a little selection for him.

There was a certain amount of drama trying to put one on him, but as they needed changing quite often (there was wound seepage) he started to get used to it. Initially it was a 2-person job though, and we had to use safety pins as well as the t-shirts tended to be a little on the big side for him, but I didn’t want him in something tight & uncomfortable.
The next issue was a long-ish recovery stuck in the dog pen. I made a point of staying with him as much as possible (luckily I could WFH then too so was always able to monitor him) and slept on some sofa cushions beside his pen each night for the first 3 weeks or so. It was a 3-storey house so I would have been 2 floors above him otherwise, and I thought he wouldn’t want to be alone (the other mogs liked to sleep on the bed, leaving very little room for the humans usually).

Ultimately he got better, and slowly we started letting him out of the pen for gentle exercise, making sure he didn’t try anything too athletic too soon. Luckily he seemed to know we were trying to help and actually behaved surprisingly well, with only minor panics from me concerning leaps up onto fences and up the garden tree. In the end all has turned out well and he is now a happy (albeit slightly tubby) fellow with a strange habit of growling at the doorbell (no idea why that is – we moved house and I think he now feels he wants peace and privacy in this nice new home of his) and despite his size it’s rare to see him eat… he is a secret eater! He also has a soft spot for his grandma (my mum) who would love to smuggle him home with her – but her husband has forbidden her from owning any more cats – theirs is a cat free environment now after 30-odd years of being a multi-cat household. Nice clean carpets they have too!

All 7 of our rescues get on very well (except the 2 young girls who wind each other up something chronic – but always in a playful / silly way) and Jack is now the 3 rd most senior cat in the house. It’s worth noting that all my cats wear collars complete with bell and nametag. Obviously, the collars must be breakaway ones, and the bell to help keep the local wildlife safe. We often check to make sure the collars are a comfortable fit as well. They tolerate wearing these because they had them from an early age. Jack understandably doesn’t like his collar fiddled with, i.e. when putting flea spot-on solution on, we take collars off for a day so as not to make the clasp sticky. He is the only one who gets a bit stressed at this, presumably because of whatever horror involving a collar caused him to have that awful injury in the first place.

It is surprisingly easy to have a problem occur like Jack’s because there’s no laws in place to stop you purchasing what are basically death traps posing as cat collars. I did this by accident – bought a batch of what I assumed to be safety collars from Etsy and when they arrived, I tried to do the little test where you fasten then pull to release, but nothing happened. Even Rob (who is no weakling) had a go and the collars wouldn’t release once fastened even under immense pressure. I was appalled so complained to the seller. Apparently they abide by whatever UK laws are in place. So that needs to change – I always recommend putting a collar with bell & nametag on a cat (despite how annoying it is when they reappear home minus this apparatus) and we always have a few backup collars & equipment just in case – we now have quite the stash! But if you’re going to do this, ensure that it is a fast-release / breakaway one (and test it frequently) and that it is not too tight – allow for a kitten growing up quickly & resize it accordingly, or a senior cat possibly losing a little weight and the collar becoming too loose. You should always be able to fit your index finger though easily. If a collar is not advertised as being a safety release one, don’t buy it – the dangerous ones may appear to be identical so it’s best to be sure first, otherwise you may end up with a large vet bill or worse….

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