Author Topic: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown  (Read 2456 times)

rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« on: 08 April, 2020, 06:29:41 am »
This is to avoid them spreading the virus on their fur, apparently.  I'll wait until it becomes an actual rule...Tigs is basically a wild animal that comes in for food and a cuddle, and he hasn't had a litter tray for 6 years.  It would drive him nuts if he were kept in.

Surely people should wash their hands after handling cats, and it's their lookout if they want to pet strange cats (I do).
Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #1 on: 08 April, 2020, 06:44:25 am »
You are Joe Exotic AICMFP.  ;D
"Il veut moins de riches, moi je veux moins de pauvres"

rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #2 on: 08 April, 2020, 06:51:04 am »
You are Joe Exotic AICMFP.  ;D
We'll, he's approaching the weight of a tiger.  If the local grannies stop feeding him out of virus fears, it will do him good.
Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #3 on: 08 April, 2020, 07:44:40 am »
Good luck trying to keep the 5kg Killing Machine indoors. Last time we tried he destroyed the cat flap and got out anyway. One of our internal doors has got damage from a previous attempt.
Too many angry people - breathe & relax.

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #4 on: 08 April, 2020, 08:49:25 am »
I can really see that happening with ours.

Actually it occurred to me that it would be easier to keep him out than in, but then I realised that we would be unable to leave a single window open since he can get in through all of them (including the upstairs ones). So that isn't going to work either.

To his credit, though, he is practising social distancing. His only interaction with other cats is to chase them off his territory.

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #5 on: 08 April, 2020, 10:25:16 am »
We have 3 cats in our household. Our big Ginger lad is generally quite placid and generally stays in at night. He likes to help in the garden and will potter with you. He got conditioned to being in mostly when he had a thyroid problem and his coat got so thin we were very careful how often he was allowed out. He's also (thankfully) wary of people who he's not been introduced to (hold him in a cuddle, let the person hold out fingers for sniff then give a gentle head-rub).

The other 2 mogs like being outside a lot. Both are much more willing to go to other people.

There's too many people out there have irrational dislike of cats anyway, with the fear whipped up by the govt propaganda machine I think it's plausible that some people will be tipped over the edge and cause harm to cats- maybe even seeking thm out to do so. After all if they will burn mobile phone towers on the basis of some woo, what happens if they can quote "science" in their self-justification?

At best we may see abandonment of cats- one to be on look out for.

GC

simonp

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #6 on: 08 April, 2020, 10:27:00 am »
Our house would become unbearably hot in the afternoons in short order.

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #7 on: 08 April, 2020, 11:28:52 am »
Fortunately for us, and Phoebe, we live out in the countryside, so she's plenty of space to roam without interacting with others. And fortunately she's very wary of other people too.
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

telstarbox

  • Loving the lanes
Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #8 on: 08 April, 2020, 11:42:52 am »
Clarification from the British Veterinary Association:
Quote
Contrary to some news reports this morning, we're NOT advising that all cats be kept indoors during the #COVID19 pandemic. Only cats from infected or self-isolating households should be kept indoors as a precaution, if possible.
2019 🏅 R1000 and B1000

Davef

Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #9 on: 08 April, 2020, 11:45:55 am »
The goal of social distancing is to prevent household to household infection. This is not not just about transfer on fur. There are examples of cats and dogs being infected by humans and now cat to cat transmission in a lab so I suppose the worry is there could be cat to human infection, though there are no documented cases. Cats could become the vector for household to household transmission, particularly if the virus becomes common in free ranging cats. People will of course overreact.


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ian

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #10 on: 08 April, 2020, 02:15:55 pm »
I read the preprint (i.e. not peer-reviewed) and they basically squirted a load of virus up various animals' noses (evidently this what people turn for recreation after several weeks of lockdown) – as several people, have stated, it's not a normal exposure and pretty much tells us nothing about anything, other than it's probably not a great idea if every scientist is allowed to run around with phials of dangerous virus.

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #11 on: 09 April, 2020, 07:17:54 am »
Pets in France risk euthanasia due to confinement laws

Quote
Thousands of dogs and cats in France may be euthanised during the Covid-19 confinement period because the rules forbid people from going out to adopt a pet, animal rescue charity la SPA has warned.

Jacques-Charles Fombonne, president of the charity, has said that its animal shelters are becoming overrun and will soon be too full to manage. The result: animals that are unable to be taken as adoptive pets will be euthanised before they even reach the shelters
.

We adopted a cat (an abandoned pet) in France because the local animal shelters were all full - that was 2018.

From our experience, abandoned pets were already an unmanageable problem back then.

I have no idea if the UK is better or worse but I can see it as a inevitable consequence of covid19.

(our rescue cat had clearly been house-trained and knew what a litter tray was for)
Move Faster and Bake Things

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #12 on: 09 April, 2020, 10:01:31 am »
Vets also warn against soaking your cats in alcohol . It seems that some people have been dumb enough to try that.

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #13 on: 09 April, 2020, 01:29:36 pm »
BVA latest statemement says only for cats at homes in isolation or infected... https://www.bva.co.uk/news-and-blog/news-article/bva-statement-on-cats-and-covid-19
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is...

Davef

Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #14 on: 09 April, 2020, 01:36:16 pm »
I read the preprint (i.e. not peer-reviewed) and they basically squirted a load of virus up various animals' noses (evidently this what people turn for recreation after several weeks of lockdown) – as several people, have stated, it's not a normal exposure and pretty much tells us nothing about anything, other than it's probably not a great idea if every scientist is allowed to run around with phials of dangerous virus.
I thought the cat to cat transmission was just by putting them in adjacent cages.

β€œTo monitor respiratory droplet transmission, an uninfected cat was placed in a cage adjacent to each of the infected cats. It was difficult to perform regular nasal wash collection on the subadult cats because they were aggressive. To avoid possible injury, we only collected feces from these cats and checked for viral RNA in their organs after euthanasia.”


https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.015347v1.full.pdf


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ian

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #15 on: 09 April, 2020, 07:20:27 pm »
Who knows, the entire study was a bit rubbish (we found viral RNA somewhere). Also doesn't appear to have appropriate ethical approval for animal experiments and I'm generally not sure it's great to have every other lab running around and sticking SARS-CoV-2 into anything that moves.

These half-cocked studies proliferate but really don't tell us anything meaningful. And then media outlets and social media pick them up.

I sincerely hope they got bitten and scratched a lot.

Pingu

  • Put away those fiery biscuits!
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    • the Igloo
Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #16 on: 09 April, 2020, 08:52:46 pm »
...squirted a load of virus up various animals' noses (evidently this what people turn for recreation after several weeks of lockdown)...

Professor Denzil Dexter

Davef

Re: Vets recommend cats are kept in during lockdown
« Reply #17 on: 10 April, 2020, 07:13:35 am »
Who knows, the entire study was a bit rubbish (we found viral RNA somewhere). Also doesn't appear to have appropriate ethical approval for animal experiments and I'm generally not sure it's great to have every other lab running around and sticking SARS-CoV-2 into anything that moves.

These half-cocked studies proliferate but really don't tell us anything meaningful. And then media outlets and social media pick them up.

I sincerely hope they got bitten and scratched a lot.
Killing and checking for the virus in organs seems quite a thorough way of testing, though impractical for the wider human population.


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