My roommate's adorable but extremely neurotic and emotionally needy cat has begun to upset herself to the point of vomitting sometimes when my roommate has to lock her out of her room. For the love of god, please help us.
The cat's name is Kazu. (
Here is a picture of her, if you're curious). She is a shelter cat we--we, but officially, my roommate--adopted last October. From what we could find out, she had a difficult kittenhood, moving from shelter to shelter to temporary owner to shelter, having most of her teeth removed, getting very sick from diarrhea, etc. Kazu is now almost five years old and she's the most affectionate and loving cat I've ever met. The flip side of this is that she
always has to be right on you, or failing that,
right next to you. Oftentimes, this is more endearing than it is exasperating, but that leads me to our problem.
The cat sleeps with my roommate. Around 5am, the cat goes nuts: running around the room, knocking things over, clawing the air conditioner, biting cords, dragging shopping bags around. My roommate's bleary-eyed fix for this, unfortunately, was to feed her. This worked for awhile. Kazu would have an early breakfast, and while she ate, my roommate would sneakily shut her door and go back to bed. Sometimes Kazu would cry and claw at the door for awhile, but she'd get over it.
My roommate decided she no longer wanted to lead the life of having to feed the cat at 5:30am every day, so she stopped. (As an aside: this stopping has happened before. My roommate went to Japan for about two weeks in April, leaving me in charge of Kazu. I am not the kind of person who feeds cats at 5:30am. Kazu dealt, with some whining and scratching at my bedroom door, which lessened over time). Now that my roommate has stopped feeding the cat at 5:30am when she shuts her out for waking her up, the cat does not deal. She mews and scratches at my roommate's door and has started leaving pools of vomit.
We think she is upsetting herself to the point that she throws up. I can relate to this. Apperently, I used to do it as a baby. I can still relate now. However, it sucks for us, and probably for Kazu as well.
Here are some facts and caveats:
-This only happens when my roommate is actually home. It only happens at night. It only happens when Kazu gets shut out of my roommate's room after having been there all night. My roommate sometimes goes out of town, and I don't sleep with Kazu, and I certainly don't feed Kazu at 5:30am, and she doesn't vomit. She sleeps or plays or does other appropriate cat things and then eats when I wake up, around 8.
-We really don't think she is physically ill. She's been to the vet recently, and nothing was wrong. She has never vomitted while we were awake or in any other circumstances. (She did, however, manage to vomit all over my roommate's Japan documents the day before she left, which did seem rather passive-aggressive (I jest about the passive-aggressive. Ah, double parentheses!))
-My roommate does not want to discontinue sleeping with Kazu. She also cannot stop kicking her out when she runs around the room and makes as much noise as possible, because my roommate needs her sleep. She's tried squirt bottles. Kazu doesn't mind water. (One day, we came home and found her sitting in the toilet, just minding her own business). She's tried other deterrents, like noise and a scat mat set around potentially noisy items that the cat seems particularly drawn to. Nothing fazes this cat, except being shut out, and the vacuum cleaner (and no, my roommate can't just start vacuuming at 5:30am every day. The point of kicking Kazu out is so she can sleep).
-I cannot split Kazu-sleeping-duty with my roommate. Neither I nor my boyfriend would deal well with her at night, and also my room is the poisonous plant room, so she can't be in there unsupervised. She's rarely in my room at all, and thus isn't as bothered by being shut out from it.
-Kazu does act out in other ways too. She sometimes leaves cat turds under the kitchen table or in other places they don't belong. We got the wrong kind of litter once, and she peed prolifically on the Japanese room-divider screen in our apartment. She has also, oddly, peed down the shower drain. She's a biter and a hisser and she's very moody--she can be purring and kneading you as you pet her, and then one minute later, she can bite you and hiss, and then the next minute, she's back on your lap. This is understandable, since she's had a hard life. We love her no matter what. But this new vomitting thing is troubling, and we're hoping to find a way to fix it--a way that satisfies all parties human and feline.
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posted by millipede at 8:17 AM on August 6, 2008