The $2200.00 Cat - Part Five: The Beginning

Confining Daisy while she continued to heal once she was home was easy. We dragged out an old dog crate, so big you could put a Great Dane in it, and set her up. As we were setting it up it occurred to me that we should have put her in here in the first place. Hind sight isn't always 20/20 but in this case it probably was. Placed in the middle of the family room she was able to be around the dogs and be safe from their exuberance.

We spent a lot of time while she was in the hospital studying the circumstances around what happened. After talking to the vet who treated her, our vet and several people from the dog training community who's opinion I respect the overall consensus was that the dogs were not being aggressive but just playing with her. Obviously the end result, her injuries, were unacceptable but all agreed that if their goal was to kill her she would have been dead. They had her trapped in an 18" x 18" area and could reach her with no problem. Her most significant injury was the skin tear and that was most likely the result of them trying to pull her out. She would have major internal injuries if they were biting to hurt her. I hear many of you thinking with Mickey's injuries any typical dog would have backed right out and quit if they were only playing, and you would be 100% correct. Pit Bulls are not typical dogs, they are not the evil killers the media has made them out to be (with help from a small percentage of horrible owners), but they were bred not to quit. If their intention was to kill her she would have died from the first bite. Two pit bulls vs one cat trapped: common sense tells you that if they wanted her dead she would be dead. Okay, back to the story....

Day one consisted of us shooing the dogs away from the crate. They were right back to the first day we brought her home with with their curiosity. Daisy needed to be confined for two weeks until the stitches were out and she had fully recovered her strength. This worked out perfectly because by the end of the two weeks both dogs had grown bored with her and were ignoring her. When we let her out we used the "leave it" command if they dogs were paying too much attention to her. They still try to play with her sometimes but even though they try to be gentle we stop them because she doesn't want to play with them, no surprise there. She was afraid of them when we brought her home but no longer fears them. To this day Mickey tries to chase her sometimes and get her to play. "Leave it" is heard about once a day still, but it started out five times a day so we are going in the right direction. You will often find Daisy sitting on someones lap on the sofa and one of the dogs laying next to them with everyone relaxed. The dogs will never be allowed to be left alone with Daisy, but it's a small price for us to pay for having this sweet kitty into our lives.