Gray Kitty gets stuck

While we were gone, our neighbors watched the kitties and horses. Well... Things were going fine until the storm. I don't know what happened, but GK demanded to go out in the snow on Sunday. He's afraid of men, and the neighbor thought he might have been freaking because of the weather and a "strange" guy in the house. Whatever the reason, GK, disappeared. No sign on Monday and no sign when we got home last night. We called and looked in all his usual places.

I was walking from the mailbox and newspaper box this morning, and I heard GK meowing really loud. He was stuck under the house. His little face was poking out of the crawlspace opening. (That is always blocked by a big piece of wood, so I don't know how he got under there.) It looked like he had been clawing at it for a while. Poor little guy.

I picked him up and fussed over him. He wasn't cold and wasn't really skinny like he'd been starving completely for 2 days. I guess he must have found a mouse to eat. But, he did stop right at his bowl once he got in. He is fine now and curled up on the chair. I think he'll probably stay in for a couple of days -- silly cat. It's a good thing he has a big mouth.

oh poor gk! good thing you had strong claws,buddy! AND a good strong voice!

OMG! Thank God he yelled for you! What a relief!

This makes the think of the time my late DaisyDog somehow managed to disappear by falling through the floor register into the crawlspace (I still swear it was a physical impossibility, but she did it) and thus went missing for 2 days. (do y'all remember that?) It took her almost 3 days to finally start howling down there so my frantic self could find her. How they manage these things I do NOT know. Maybe all pets have a secret handbook they consult when they think it's time to shake things up around the house.

Anyway, I'm so glad and grateful GK got himself found! I'll bet he sticks close to home for a little while.

Welll I'll vote for the secret handbook. OMG is right glad GK is fine
but what a scary experience. What a silly cat boy.

I'm glad GK was found and is doing well. I think late Snuggles managed to escape outside and went missing overnight. She did come back and didn't try to go outside for a few days.

Good thing GK has a very loud voice, and knows when to use it. Poor baby, stuck like that for two whole days! I have a feeling you will have a velcro-house-cat for a couple of days...........

After sleeping ON me all night, GK seems to have recovered. He's back to his normal squeaky self, but he isn't going out in the cold much. He spent a couple hours outside today, but came RUNNING in when I opened the door at lunch time. He is sleeping a lot. I'm not sure if that's because he's exhausted from his ordeal or if it's just because he's a cat and it's winter.

Suzzzz, you're right... The animals seem to have some secret way of getting into trouble just when we need things shaken up. I looked closer today and have NO idea how GK got into the crawl space.

An equine vet I had in the mid 90's told me of a call that
he was on. He was called out to a stable to put 15 or more stiches
in the chest area of a horse. The only thing in the stall was a water bucket.
Go figure.

did the horse make an escape into a hole in the wall??

No. horse was snug in his stall. The only thing in his stall was
his water and feed bucket. That was it.

bpaquet wrote:Suzzzz, you're right... The animals seem to have some secret way of getting into trouble just when we need things shaken up. I looked closer today and have NO idea how GK got into the crawl space.

This reminds me of the time that Beans figured out how to get into the wall at the apartment in Lansing. Let me tell you..., that was one weird call to the maintenance man at 5:30 in the a.m. While she got in thru the baseboard in the kitchen cabinetry it was at an angle where she could not get out. The maintenance man ended up reconfiguring the "point of entry" so that I could pull the baseboard away if she snuck in again. Point is, when you figure out the point of entry, you could reconfigure it so GK doesn't get into anymore "trouble".

I think the key is going to be a new door to the crawlspace. It's pretty trashed now because of the clawing and gnawing. I can't see any other open holes from the outside. We have flood vents, but they are all covered by screening and don't have any damage that I can see. Who knows... Silly kitty! (He's crashed on his chair now.)

It's certainly a mystery. Any way a determined cat could have pushed the crawlspace door hard enough to gain slinky-cat entry? I wish I could come see your house. I know you've checked everything, but I'm just so curious! Dadburned animals, they can make their wishes known well enough (Lord knows they have us all well trained!), but they refuse to tell us the things we really want to know!

He probably could have pulled the door open to slink in and then maybe the snow/wind blew it shut. The door is a wood board that coveers a hole that is about two and a half feet wide and a foot and a half high. No large people under our house!

Suzzz, our house is a pretty typical old farm house. It was originally on brick piers and sometime (in the 40s?) people put cinder block in the openings. My guess is that they sealed it uo to keep the newly installed pipes from freezing. It has the original 1902 front portion, which is a 2 story rectangle with a wide front porch, and a 1 story addition put on sometime in the 1920s. The entire foundation is brick and cinder block that SEEMS to be pretty solid. The crawlspace is a low area with all the plumbing and venting und the floor. You can even see where the old knob and tube wiring used to be. It's a grreat place for kitties to find shmousies, but I do try to keep it sealed up. We had a family of either opposums or raccoons undere there when we moved in. They left and a poor skunkie wandererd in and PEW! Thank goodness she found her way out.

AHHH!!! The adventures of country living.
How are Petie and OK doing?

geez, all my years in the country and we never had critters under the house! but we didn't have a lot of trees around (just fields with corn,soybeans, carrots etc)and a basement.though we did have cats that crawled through the pipe and wound up taking a swim in the cistern! (I never heard the end of how one of my cats ripped the hell out of mom's new mother's day nightgown one year cuz she had to fish him out!)It only seemed to be the white cats that liked to go for a swim though!

I've had lots of kittens and an occasional small kitty get stuck under the trailer I was living in. The place where the water pipe came up out of the ground had a nice big pit dug around it (I guess in case it leaked) and it was dark under there. So they'd get in past a loose part of the skirting and then fall in that hole. I could barely fit under there crawling like a snake to get them out.

When we moved in, the sellers hadn't sealed up the flood vents, so animals could come and go. The venting was pulled away from the floor vents and there was all kinds of poo under there. (The sellers were gross!) When we got a new heater (because the old one burned up from never getting a new filter for who knows how many years), the people who installed it put the venting back together and sealed up the flood vents. We hardly ever get anything under there except mice. I think the kitties keep them away for the most part, but when the weather gets cold, one of the hunters always finds one. Then, there's no more sign for a long time.

There's always one mouse who figures "they'll never catch ME" and then finds out the hard way he was wrong. At least you aren't getting anything bigger than mice under there, like skunks or possum.

Well GK got stuck in a different way today. We got back from a friend's picnic/pool party and GK was crying. He couldn't pee. Poor guy. This is his second bout of the problem. We don't know if he ate something he shouldn't have, but we do know that we only fed him acceptable food.

We took him to the emergency vet, and they are going to catheterize him and do blood work. He gets to stay in the hospital for 2 days to make sure he is ok. I'm sure he will be ok. My wallet is screaming, but what can you do? Poor little guy.

Poor boy((((((((HEALING VIBES))))))))))))))))

oh poor puss...is it crystals?? i hate crystals...i won't even drink crystal lite because it has that awful word in it! Toothpick agrees and is sending some good healing and peeing vibes GK's way:)

Good news! Minimal crystals. The stoppage was caused by swelling from a urinary tract infection. The only crystals are from him being stopped up for a few hours. They are clearing on their own. So, he is in the hospital again tonight just to make sure he can pee on his own. He comes home tomorrow to take antibiotics. Phew!

He has been loving on his vet. She has found out that his loving side is the right, but he's kind of funny about his left side. If you pet the right side of his face, he purrs. If you pet the left he allows it, but doesn't really like it.

So glad to hear GK's probs are so fixable! Gotta wonder if anything's going on with his left side. Weezer's like that too, though; she'll accept strokes from my right hand on her right side, but if I approach from the left she defends.

That's interesting about Weez and GK. I don't think any of mine have been like
that. Glad to hear that he's on the mend and will be home tomorrow.